Beccaria therefore maintained the abolition of the death penalty, which neither prevents crimes nor has an effective deterrent effect; For this reason, he was interested in the prevention of crimes, which he said was achieved more by the certainty of the penalty than by its severity (principle first developed by the Englishman Robert Peel). BeccarÃa affirmed that for any criminal to spend life in prison with deprivation of liberty was worse than a death sentence, while the execution does not serve as a deterrent to the criminal, since people tend to forget and completely erase the memories of a traumatic act and full of blood; In addition, in the collective memory the execution was not linked to a specific memory of guilt (having not been following the process).