I want to share a narrative I often present in a similar form to my students and conclude with an observation about how some people perceive my politics.
Many of my students identify as progressives (typical of higher-education social science programs) and uniformly view incarceration as a right-wing idea. In fact, incarceration is a liberal invention. Liberals sought to replace torture and retributive approaches with a rational system of justice grounded in the principles of deterrence, incapacitation, and rehabilitation.
I tell this story to help all students understand the moral and political character of modern criminal justice. Part of its value is in showing progressive students how ideology can distort history and principle; it also helps conservative students see that the institutions they support rest on liberal, not traditional conservative, foundations. My goal is to not only correct misperception but also deepen their political-philosophical understanding.
The emergence of modern criminal justice in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was deeply rooted in the liberal tradition, which emphasized individual rights, legal constraints on state power, and rational governance—what Herbert Packer identifies as the “due process model” in his article “Two Models of the Criminal Process,” in a 1964 issue of the University of Pennsylvania Law Review.
Two of the most influential figures shaping this new penal philosophy were Jeremy Bentham and Cesare Beccaria. Their works clarified the aims and methods of punishment in the modern state and circulated widely in Britain, continental Europe, and the American colonies. The philosophers provided the intellectual foundation for the rise of penal confinement and the development of the penitentiary as a core institution of criminal justice. Far from being a right-wing creation, the penitentiary was a liberal reform.
Jeremy Bentham’s 1789 Principles of Morals and Legislation articulated a systematic utilitarian approach to legal and penal reform. Bentham emphasized deterrence and incapacitation as rational goals of punishment, seeking to minimize suffering while maximizing social utility. His architectural design for the Panopticon—a subject on which I devote an entire lecture—symbolized a broader shift toward a humane, systematized mode of punishment intended to replace the arbitrary and often brutal practices of earlier eras.
For Bentham, criminal justice should be guided by general laws, proportionality, and a view of offenders as individuals whose behavior could be shaped through predictable incentives and disincentives. Moreover, he insisted that the judicial process focus on acts rather than actors: class, gender, race, and other statuses were irrelevant; actions were what mattered.
Cesare Beccaria’s 1764 On Crimes and Punishments similarly transformed the moral landscape of criminal law. Writing decades before Bentham, Beccaria offered a powerful Enlightenment critique of disproportionality, secrecy, and torture. He argued for clarity in the law, proportional penalties, and the rational administration of justice. (For this, his book was added to the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, the Church’s official list of forbidden books in 1766.)
Beccaria’s emphasis on legality, liberty, and predictable legal processes resonated deeply with American political leaders. The principles he articulated—visible in key provisions of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights—shaped American commitments to due process, bans on cruel and unusual punishment, and the rights of the accused. Beccaria helped shift the prevailing view toward deprivation of liberty (unfreedom for those who break the law), rather than capital and corporal punishments, as the primary penal instrument of the state.
Inspired by these ideas, reformers in the nascent United States moved rapidly toward creating institutions devoted to penal confinement. The first American penitentiaries emerged in the 1790s, grounded in the belief that offenders could be reformed through regulated labor, separation from corrupting influences, and structured discipline. By the end of the eighteenth century, the penitentiary had become a defining feature of the American penal order.
While Northern states adopted this model most rapidly, Southern states also had early advocates. In Virginia, for example, the establishment of a penitentiary was driven partly by the reformist impulses of Thomas Jefferson, whose broader political philosophy—deeply indebted to John Locke—aligned with liberal commitments to equality under the law, individual rights, and rationalized governance. The system across America was elaborated during the nineteenth century.
The intellectual foundations of these reforms rested squarely on the classical liberal tradition. Drawing from Beccaria, Bentham, Locke, Montesquieu, and other liberal thinkers, American constitutionalism and early criminal justice were built on the idea that political authority derives from the consent and rights of individuals and that punishment must be justified by general principles rather than arbitrary force. This framework informed the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights, each presupposing a political order grounded in individual liberty, limits on state coercion, and the rule of law.
Seen in this light, I explain to students, the rise of the penitentiary in the United States was not merely an administrative reform but an expression of deeper philosophical commitments. It is a window into the foundation of a free society. Confinement became the preferred mode of punishment precisely because it aligns with liberal principles: it operates through law rather than spectacle, proportionality rather than cruelty, and treats offenders as autonomous individuals capable of reform.
Far from reflecting traditional conservatism, the penitentiary embodies a humane and optimistic vision of justice. The emergence of the penitentiary system stands as a central example of how Enlightenment liberalism reshaped the modern state and gave enduring institutional form to its moral and political ideals.
Of course, as implied above, some now argue that liberalism is not left-wing but right-wing—a view that ignores history. This revisionist approach would classify the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as elements of right-wing governance. If one identifies as “on the left” and equates left-wing politics with progressivism, then liberalism indeed becomes “right-wing” by contrast.
But in truth, progressivism—emerging as a post-liberal ideology supporting the rise of the corporate state after the Civil War, paralleling its social-democratic counterpart in Europe—is not left-wing in the classical sense. Progressivism elevates administrative and bureaucratic authority over the individual. It is an illiberal philosophy.
The point is that, if progressivism—rooted in corporatism and the ascent of a new administrative aristocracy—is labeled “left-wing,” then liberalism—understood as a commitment to individual liberty—becomes “right-wing,” simply because it stands in opposition to progressivism. This reframing reverses the ideological map as it was understood at the time of America’s founding and the French Revolution. Clever, to be sure.
Here’s the upshot: because I am a liberal, the swapping of political-philosophical sides makes me appear right-wing. Is it any mystery, then, why so many self-identified leftists accuse me of switching sides? What happened is that, beginning in earnest around 2018, as I explained in last Saturday’s essay, I shed ideas that contradicted my liberal principles. This meant rejecting the progressive elements in my thinking. Through the distorted lens of the camera obscura, sharpening my thinking with the stone of principle has transformed me into a right-winger. So be it—but there it is. I am much happier as a result.
freedom and reason 