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Beccaria – “On Crimes And Punishments”

November 4, 2018 By Margit

Cesare Beccaria is seen by many people as the “father of criminology.” Here is a brief summary of his ideas and famous essay “On Crimes and Punishments,” both in video and text format.

Table of Contents

Discussions about Crime and Punishment

Cesare Beccaria is seen by many people as the “father of criminology” for his ideas about crime, punishment, and criminal justice procedures. He was an Italian born as an aristocrat in the year 1738 in Milan. At that time European thought about crime and punishment was still very much dominated by the old idea that crime was sin and that it was caused by the devil and by demons. And in part to punish the devil and the demons that were causing crime, very harsh punishments were used. At the time when Beccaria came along, the era of Enlightenment was in full swing, and scientists were starting to challenge the old views, but the people who had political power were not ready to leave those old ideas behind yet.

Beccaria didn’t start out as an intellectual. In fact, he wasn’t considered to be above average or interested really when it came to science or philosophy. But after he completed his law studies at the University of Pavia, he started to surround himself with a group of young men who were interested in all kinds of philosophical issues and social problems. And the intellectual discussions that Beccaria was able to have with these people led him to question many of the practices that were common in his time, including the way in which offenders were being punished for their crimes.

Publication of Beccaria’s “On Crimes and Punishments”

Beccaria’s famous work, “On Crimes and Punishments,” was published in 1764, when he was 26 years old. His essay called out the barbaric and arbitrary ways in which the criminal justice system operated. Sentences were very harsh, torture was common, there was a lot of corruption, there were secret accusations and secret trials, and there was a lot of arbitrariness in the way in which sentences were imposed. There was no such thing as equality before the law. And powerful people of high status were treated very differently from people who were poor and who did not have a lot of status.

Beccaria’s ideas clashed dramatically with these practices. And I’ll go through some of the central principles that his work is based on.

Only the Law Can Prescribe Punishment

According to Beccaria, only the law can prescribe punishment. It is up to the legislator to define crime and to prescribe which punishment should be imposed. It is not up to a magistrate or a judge to impose a penalty if the legislator has not prescribed it. And neither is it up to a judge to change what the law says about how a crime should be punished. The judge should do exactly what the law says.

The Law Applies Equally to All People

In addition, Beccaria said that the law applies equally to all people. And so punishment should be the same for all people, regardless of their power and status.

Making the Law and Law Enforcement Public

Beccaria also believed in the power of making the law and law enforcement public. More specifically, laws should be published so that people actually know about them, and trials should be public, too. Only then can onlookers judge if the trial is fair.

Beccaria: Punishments Should be Proportional, Certain, and Swift

Regarding severe punishment, Beccaria said that if severe punishments do not prevent crime, they should not be used. Instead, punishments should be proportional to the harm that the crime has caused. According to Beccaria, the aim of punishment is not to cause pain to the offender, but to prevent them from doing it again and to prevent other people from committing crime. In order to be able to do that, Beccaria believed that punishment should be certain and swift. He believed that if offenders were sure that they would be punished and if punishment would come as quickly as possible after the offense, that this would have the largest chance of preventing crime.

Beccaria Argued Against the Death Penalty

As another controversial issue, Beccaria argued against the death penalty. In his view, the state does not have the right to repay violence with more violence. And in addition to that, Beccaria believed that the death penalty was useless. The death penalty is momentary, it is not lasting and therefore the death penalty cannot be very successful in preventing crimes. Instead, lasting punishments, such as life imprisonment, would be more successful in preventing crimes, because potential offenders will find this a much more miserable condition than the death penalty.

No Right To Torture

Similarly, according to Cesare Beccaria, the state does not have the right to torture. Because no one is guilty until he or she is found guilty, no one has the right to punish a person by torturing him or her. Plus, people who are under torture will want the torture to stop and might therefore make false claims, including that they committed a crime they did not commit. So torture is also ineffective.

The Power of Education

Instead of torture and severe penalties, Beccaria believed that education is the most certain method of preventing crime.

Beccaria: Controversy and Success

Beccaria’s ideas are hardly controversial today, but they caused a lot of controversy at the time, because they were an attack on the entire criminal justice system. Beccaria initially published his essay anonymously, because he didn’t necessarily consider it to be a great idea to publish such radical ideas. And this idea was partly confirmed when the book was put on the black list of the Catholic Church for a full 200 years.

But even though his ideas were controversial back then, his essay became an immediate success. In fact, Cesare Beccaria’s ideas became the basis for all modern criminal justice systems and there is some evidence that his essay influenced the American and French revolutions which happened not long after the publication of the essay. His ideas were not original, because others had also proposed them, but Beccaria was the first one to present them in a consistent way. Many people were ready for the changes that he proposed, which is why his essay was such a success.

Beccaria ends his essay with what can be seen as a kind of summary of his view:

“So that any punishment be not an act of violence of one or of many against another, it is essential that it be public, prompt, necessary, minimal in severity as possible under given circumstances, proportional to the crime, and prescribed by the laws.”

You can find Cesare Beccaria’s full essay “On Crimes and Punishments” here .

An Essay on Crimes and Punishments

Anonymous 1767 English translation of Dei delitti e delle pene (1764). Foundational text of modern criminology. Famous for the Marquis Beccaria's arguments against torture and capital punishment. Warning: template has been deprecated.

PUNISHMENTS,

TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN;

COMMENTARY,

ATTRIBUTED TO

Mons. De VOLTAIRE,

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH.

THE FOURTH EDITION

Printed for F. Newbery, at the Corner of St. Paul's Church-Yard.

• Preface of the Translator

• Criminology
• Works originally in Italian
• Pages containing deprecated templates/Wikipediaref
• Translations without translator information specified
• Headers applying DefaultSort key

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Of Crimes and Punishments

Cesare Bonesana, Marchese Beccaria, 1738-1794

Originally published in Italian in 1764

Introductory Material

Table of Contents

Excerpts from

An essay on crimes and punishments, by cesare beccaria translated from the italian, 1775 (original published in 1764), introduction, chapter i: of the origin of punishments, chapter ii: of the right to punish, chapter vi: of the proportion between crimes and punishments, chapter xii: of the intent of punishments, chapter xix: of the advantage of immediate punishment, chapter xxvii: of the mildness of punishments.

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The first amendment, historic document, on crimes and punishments (1764).

Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria | 1764

Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria, marquis of Gualdasco and Villaregio (1738-94), was the author of On Crimes and Punishments (1764). Inspired by the discussion of criminal law in Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws , this Milanese wrote a systematic treatise on the subject that was almost immediately translated into English and French. In it, he argued that the sole purpose of punishment is deterrence, and he denounced torture, the entertainment of secret accusations, and the death penalty; suggested that pre-trial detention can rarely be justified; and called for promptitude in punishment. The impact of his little book on the post-revolutionary revisal of the laws in the various nascent American states was considerable.

Selected by

Professor of History and Charles O. Lee and Louise K. Lee Chair in the Western Heritage at Hillsdale College

Jeffrey Rosen

President and CEO, National Constitution Center

Colleen A. Sheehan

Professor of Politics at the Arizona State University School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership

Chapter 1: Of the Origin of Punishment

Laws are the conditions under which men, naturally independent, united themselves in society. Weary of living in a continual state of war, and of enjoying a liberty which became of little value, from the uncertainty of its duration, they sacrificed one part of it to enjoy the rest in peace and security. . . .

Chapter 2: Of the Right to Punish

Every punishment which does not arise from absolute necessity, says the great Montesquieu, is tyrannical. A proposition which may be made more general, thus. Every act of authority of one man over another, for which there is not an absolute necessity, is tyrannical. It is upon this, then, that the sovereign’s right to punish crimes is founded; that is, upon the necessity of defending the public liberty, intrusted to his care, from the usurpation of individuals. . . .

No man ever gave up his liberty merely for the good of the public. Such a chimera exists only in romances. Every individual wishes, if possible, to be exempt from the compacts that bind the rest of mankind. . . .

Observe, that by justice I understand nothing more than that bond, which is necessary to keep the interest of individuals united; without which, men would return to the original state of barbarity. All punishments, which exceed the necessity of preserving this bond, are in their nature unjust.

Chapter 6: Of the Proportion between Crimes and Punishments

It is not only the common interest of mankind that crimes should not be committed, but that crimes of every kind should be less frequent, in proportion to the evil they produce to society. Therefore, the means made use of by the legislature to prevent crimes, should be more powerful, in proportion as they are destructive of the public safety and happiness, and as the inducements to commit them are stronger. Therefore there ought to be a fixed proportion between crimes and punishments.

Chapter 12: Of the Intent of Punishments

From the foregoing considerations it is evident, that the intent of punishments is not to torment a sensible being, nor to undo a crime already committed. Is it possible that torments, and useless cruelty, the instruments of furious fanaticism, or of impotency of tyrants, can be authorized by a political body? which, so far from being influenced by passion, should be the cool moderator of the passions of individuals. Can the groans of a tortured wretch recal the time past, or reverse the crime he has committed? The end of punishment, therefore, is no other, than to prevent others from committing the like offence. Such punishments, therefore, and such a mode of inflicting them, ought to be chosen, as will make strongest and most lasting impressions on the minds of others, with the least torment to the body of the criminal.

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An Essay On Crimes And Punishments Hardcover – July 25, 2007

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• Print length 244 pages
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• Publisher Kessinger Publishing
• Publication date July 25, 2007
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Kessinger Publishing (July 25, 2007)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
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72 episodes

Beccaria's treatise On Crimes and Punishments, which condemns disproportionate and irrational penalties in general as well as torture and the death penalty, is said to mark the peak of Enlightenment in Milan. Its translations were widely read by statesmen and policy makers in Britain, America and France. This translation also features the anonymous commentary, attributed to Voltaire.

Essay on Crimes and Punishments, An by Voltaire and Cesare Beccaria Voltaire and Cesare Beccaria

• 29 SEPT 2023

Introduction

Preface by the translator of m.d. voltaire's commentary, chapter i - on the origin of punishments, chapter ii - on the right to punish, chapter iii - consequences of the foregoing principles, chapter iv - of the interpretation of laws.

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Court Victory Disturbs Malaysia’s Balancing Act on Islamic Law

A new federal ruling has islamists up in arms..

Would Wan Ahmad Fayhsal Wan Ahmad Kamal, an up-and-coming Malaysian parliamentarian, be happy to see a woman stoned if she were convicted of adultery? “Well, I would not be happy to see it, but it is God’s law and as a politician I am mandated to see His law implemented,” He told me. For now, such a day seems far away in Malaysia.

Syariah courts, which implement codes passed by state assemblies based on their interpretations of Islam’s sharia law, play an integral but also carefully circumscribed role in Malaysia’s legal system. In recent years, Islamist parties and groups in Malaysia that have long cherished the hope of expanding the scope of syariah courts have grown in strength. However, attempts to expand these courts’ jurisdiction have run into legal opposition.

On Feb. 9, the Federal Court, Malaysia’s highest judicial body, ruled on a case brought forward by two Malay Muslim women, Nik Elin Zurina Nik Abdul Rashid and her daughter Tengku Yasmin Nastasha Tengku Abdul Rahman. The women alleged that various syariah provisions passed by the Kelantan State Legislative Assembly, where the Islamist Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS) and its ally control 43 seats, had violated Malaysia’s constitution by claiming jurisdiction over matters that, in fact, fell under the remit of federal law.

The court sided with them. In a ruling penned by the chief justice, Tengku Maimun Tuan Mat, a headscarf-wearing Malay woman, the court decided in favor of the defendants, striking down provisions covering sodomy, necrophilia, incest, gambling, sexual harassment, giving false evidence, use of false measures, and desecrating places of worship. Two provisions regarding adoption and words capable of breaking peace remained standing. The only dissent was by a judge who felt the claimants didn’t have standing to bring the case, since they had not been harmed by the laws.

Politics and policy in Malaysia have always been an ethnic balancing act. Currently, Islam is practiced by about 64 percent of the population, mostly ethnic Malays, while the Chinese and Indian minorities and others follow a variety of faiths from Buddhism to Christianity.

The role of syariah courts in Malaysia is central to this balancing act. On the one hand, with jurisdiction over matters of family law and personal faith, the scope and nature of many syariah codes can seem shocking to non-Malaysians. All Muslims are subject to their jurisdiction with no opt-out, since these codes ban Muslims from converting to another religion. Corporal punishment can be applied with strokes of the cane—though this is also common in Malaysian civil law. Malay women have complained that family and divorce courts are biased against them.

On the other hand, as the Nik Elin case reaffirms, numerous offenses do not fall within their remit. The severity of the punishments they can hand out is a maximum of three years in jail, 5,000 ringgit (about $1,050) in fines, and six strokes of a cane. No matter how certain scholars might interpret the Quran, so-called hudud punishments like stoning adulterers, executing apostates, and crucifying highway robbers are off the table.

The plaintiffs, the court, and Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim have been at pains to argue the case and ruling only concerned a dry jurisdictional issue. Certain classes of offense fall under the authority of the federal government and the court found that the Kelantan assembly had overstepped its boundaries legislating on crimes not under its authority. This would have been the case whether the laws passed were civil or syariah. “[T]he issue before us is irrelevant with regards to the position of Islam or the Syariah Court in this country,” the court ruling read .

Nonetheless, backlash has been ferocious. Nik Elin and Tengku Yasmin, members of an aristocratic Kelantanese family and both qualified lawyers, have received abuse and death threats . A government minister belonging to the Democratic Action Party (DAP), a multiracial party that in practice mostly represents non-Muslim Chinese voters, who suggested non-Muslim legal experts should be included in any review of syariah’s role in Malaysia, had notes scattered outside his mother’s house warning him not to “challenge Islam.”

Nik Elin, responding to written questions from Foreign Policy , said that while she was surprised by the intensity of the backlash, “I was not caught completely off guard though as I knew that certain parties would paint the petition as a matter of religion, or, specifically, Islamic doctrine. This is a deliberate mischaracterization, but it earns them the most political points. Religion sells in Malaysia.”

The opposition coalition Perikatan Nasional (PN) has played a big role in mobilizing opposition to the ruling. While PN is formally led by the Malay nationalist Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia (PPBM), the PAS is a bigger part of the coalition—with 43 MPs to PPBM’s 25. And while Malay nationalists and Islamists have in the past feuded, they also overlap in their voters and identity politics.

To be Malay—and receive various legally enshrined privileges, from scholarships to access to government contracts—you have to be Muslim. And, as PPBM aligns with PAS, its MPs are increasingly adopting positions and rhetoric similar to those of PAS. “There’s no divide between [PPBM] and PAS on this issue,” said Wan Ahmad, who studied at King’s College London and once called PAS supporters “stupid” on X, formerly Twitter.

For some, this current mobilization seems like another sign of a wider political agenda of slow Islamization of the state. “Article 4 talks about the Federal Constitution being the highest law of the land,” said Syahredzan Johan, a Malay Muslim MP for the DAP. “But they [opposition politicians] are going to try and say you also need to talk about Article 3, which talks about Islam being the religion of the federation; therefore, any laws must not be against Islam. This sort of argument is starting to seep through.”

For certain sections of the Malay nationalist and religious right, any limits placed on Malay and Islamic dominance chafe, and the new ruling has been an opportunity to mobilize. As early as last year, PAS-aligned media published an article calling the case a “ tombstone ” for syariah in Malaysia. And on March 6, the Kelantan assembly unanimously passed a motion calling for the reinstatement of the struck-down provisions. Even the two opposition legislators supported it, one explaining, “We want to go to heaven.”

While the ruling may be narrowly jurisdictional, the religious dimensions of the case are hard to escape. Although the court ruling opened by arguing the case did not bear upon the status of Islam or syariah in Malaysia, it followed this with Quranic exegesis distinguishing between laws where punishments are set by Allah, and takzir punishments that are at the discretion of political leaders. Given the limits placed on syariah courts in Malaysia, all punishments they dole out are takzir, so striking down Kelantan’s laws violates no religious principle.

Nik Elin echoed these arguments and suggested that the ruling, in fact, represents “an opportunity to harmonize the civil courts with the syariah courts” and even enhance syariah courts by making them more “progressive” on various aspects of family law. She gave the example that, currently, a Malay man might engage in polygamy without the knowledge or consent of his first wife by filing a marriage application to another woman in a state with less stringent laws.

Critics, however, aren’t buying it. “What Nik Elin has done is open Pandora’s box,” Wan Ahmad said. “The case sets a precedent, so we expect others to mount similar challenges, and this will mean that the status of syariah will become a political issue.” Many have pointed out that this latest ruling has come just a few years after a similar one finding syariah provisions in Selangor unconstitutional on similar grounds.

Syahredzan is more skeptical, arguing few people had the time, resources, or expertise to pursue similar cases. But he admitted there’s no denying Nik Elin and Tengku Yasmin’s case does have wider implications. “She’s [Nik Elin] trying to prove a point. That’s the whole point of her strategic litigation in order to move the needle.”

The tricky bit, according to Shahril Hamdan, the former information chief of the United Malays National Organization (UMNO), is that it is hard to make arguments about the limitations on the scope of syariah as a Muslim or to Muslim voters. “Syariah is seen as God’s law, so even a so-called liberal or moderate Muslim cannot question it. You can debate how or when you get there, but you can never reject the substance of it.”

Shahril, who has a Chinese mother and studied in the U.K. at the University of Manchester and London School of Economics, said that practicalities mean he would not actively seek to make syariah and hudud punishments the supreme law of the land in Malaysia. “But if you ask me to say I reject syariah qua syariah, I would not do it.”

But figures like Shahril no longer play the central role in politics they once did, following the collapse of the once-dominant UMNO party. UMNO is now a junior coalition partner in the government, and most Malay votes go to PPBM or PAS. “When I was in UMNO, I could say that I was part of a moderate wing that made concessions but ultimately kept the harder-line fringes in check,” Shahril said. “Now I think we’re seeing the same process that we’ve seen in right-wing parties all over the world; these voices are being displaced and such parties risk being taken over by populists who play up ethnonationalist issues.”

Even the government, heavily reliant on minority votes, has responded nervously, suggesting it will look into ways that syariah criminal laws might be enacted within the limits of the Federal Constitution, keen not to alienate the crucial slice of Malay support it still retains.

Indeed, one of the few institutions currently able to effectively intervene to try to moderate religious debates are Malaysia’s royals. “It’s difficult for the opposition to ride on this fully when, if they do it, then they might be seen as going against the rulers,” Syahredzan said. Malaysia’s sultans command enormous respect and a special legitimacy in religious affairs, being constitutionally given leadership in this area and charged with defending Islam in their respective states.

When the Nik Elin case was decided, the sultan of Selangor, who until recently served as chair of the Malaysian National Council for Islamic Religious Affairs, spoke urging all parties to accept the result. When the leader of PAS, Abdul Hadi Awang, made a post on PAS’s official site criticizing rulers who valued this world over the hereafter, he faced a rare royal rebuke and had to apologize. The Sultan has ordered the creation of a special committee to look into the place of syariah in Malaysia – and presumably will hold great influence over its direction.”

For Nik Elin, the debate so far has shed much more heat than light. She blamed much of the furor on people misunderstanding the nature of the case as being anti-syariah and, in a past interview, on male politicians who felt “their ego[s] … got scratched” by her and her daughter.

Still, she declared that she has no regrets. “Our petition was allowed. That means we won. Most people get to enjoy their wins, but unfortunately for us, we were not given the same privilege. The truth is, my only regret is that our detractors had failed to separate the person from the petition. But we’ll move on.” And, as for those who have failed this test and attacked her character and faith, she gives them short shrift. No matter what they might say, “I was born and raised a Muslim. I will die a Muslim.”

Meanwhile, self-proclaimed defenders of Islam have already found a new outrage to condemn—some socks with the word “Allah” printed on them. There have already been arson attacks .

Joseph Rachman is a freelance journalist covering Indonesia and other stories from around Southeast Asia. Twitter:  @rachman_joseph

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• Published April 11, 2024 Updated April 12, 2024, 4:23 a.m. ET

In a high school lobby in New Jersey, the principal saw a student heading toward a stairway and moved to cut her off. There was physical contact between them, though no blows.

The interaction lasted less than a minute.

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The student filed an affirmative action complaint against the principal, saying that he had grabbed her and “slammed” her against a wall. The student is Black; the principal is white and Latino.

The principal, reporting the episode later that day, said he was preventing an altercation between the student and three others, who said she had threatened them.

Over the months that followed, those roughly 60 seconds, captured partially on video, have divided neighbors across two towns, spawned two investigations and set off a legal process that could end with the principal in prison.

On March 11, almost exactly a year after the encounter, the principal, Frank Sanchez, was taken into custody and charged with assault and endangering a minor.

What happened that day last spring at Columbia High School, a high-performing school that serves the towns of Maplewood and South Orange, N.J., has become a Rorschach test for a liberal school district with a racially mixed population.

Did Mr. Sanchez use unlawful force against a vulnerable 15-year-old in his care? Or was he simply protecting students from harm?

The answers hinge on Mr. Sanchez’s state of mind and the student’s intentions — unknowable elements into which community members have projected their own experiences and assumptions. In a district that is both diverse and divided, the assumptions do not fall neatly along racial or political lines.

A lawyer for the student, who is no longer at the school, said the case revealed a side of the community that many residents did not want to face. The lawyer, James H. Davis III, is chairman of the Black Parents Workshop, an organization that has sued the school district over racial disparities in the past, including unequal punishments for Black students.

“How many other Black students have been ignored over the years that something’s happened to them, in violation of their rights and privileges?” he asked.

But many in the school district tell a different story, of a popular principal simply intervening to prevent a fight and being targeted by people inside and outside the school who opposed his philosophy for running it.

Within days of the arrest, students at the high school held a walkout in support of Mr. Sanchez, and parents and teachers rallied at the town hall, where one demonstrator held up a sign that read, “Who’s Next?”

Charges of bad faith abound.

“Fundamentally, this story is about something having gone horribly awry in our school community,” said Rhea Mokund-Beck, a parent who supports Mr. Sanchez. “There has been such a breakdown of trust. Such a breakdown of good will. Such a breakdown of even understanding what public education is for. And then one layers that with all of the dynamics of race and class, and, you know, this is about a real maelstrom that we’ve made for ourselves.”

Inequality in a Proudly Diverse Community

South Orange and Maplewood, situated about 20 miles west of New York City, are liberal towns with a mix of affluent professionals and working-class families. The high school, a colossal, century-old Gothic Revival edifice serving a racially diverse student body of 2,000, ranks in the Top 10 percent of schools statewide, according to U.S. News and World Report, and routinely sends students to elite colleges.

The two towns, sometimes abbreviated SOMA, trumpet their progressive colors in their multiple social justice organizations, including SOMA Justice , SOMA Action and Community Coalition on Race , and in a 40-foot mural, “ I Am Maplewood ,” depicting a child’s face divided into six sections, each conveying a different racial identity.

But the school system has long had an achievement gap between white and Black students, with Black students graduating and attending college at lower rates, despite years of lawsuits and programs to fix the disparities. A former superintendent, citing the lack of progress, told the school board in 2018, “We have open and visible segregation in the elementary schools, and classroom segregation at the high school level.”

The Black Parents Workshop , which formed in 2014 , sued the district in 2018, charging that Black students were routinely assigned to less rigorous academic tracks and were suspended more frequently than white students for the same acts. The suit was settled in 2020, with the district agreeing to an outside monitor and a complete audit of its practices and outcomes.

Frank Sanchez, who started at Columbia High School that fall, was not an obvious candidate to repair the school’s racial disparities. His previous job was at Mountain Lakes High School in Mountain Lakes, N.J., where the student body is less than 2 percent Black.

The Black Parents Workshop opposed his hiring, citing the economic and demographic differences between Mountain Lakes and Columbia, as did an outspoken parent named Elissa Malespina, who would soon join the school board.

Mr. Sanchez arrived at Columbia to find a starkly divided student body. “Some students spent Covid in Aspen,” he said, “and some went to a White Castle or a Burger King to get Wi-Fi because they didn’t have it at home.” He hoped his background, as a son of Cuban immigrants, would help him connect with students from the district’s sizable Haitian American community.

A New Approach to School Discipline

Mr. Sanchez made a point to greet students by name in the mornings and to walk the halls between periods, and he called on administrators to do the same. He also introduced changes to the school’s disciplinary processes, which met resistance from some at the school and on the board.

He wanted to cut back on student suspensions, which fell disproportionately on Black students, and to reduce police access to students, which he felt abetted a “school-to-prison pipeline.”

These measures, he said in an interview, put him at odds with some of the “law and order” administrators at the school, as well as the local Police Department. They also drew opposition from the Black Parents Workshop. “Our position has always been, if students are committing crimes, they need to be held accountable,” said Walter Fields, the group’s founder. If students do not feel safe at school, he added, it “creates systemic barriers to learning for Black children.”

It was against this backdrop that Mr. Sanchez encountered a ninth grader in the school lobby last March 9.

Mr. Sanchez, school officials, the student, the prosecutor and the police all declined to discuss the episode. Teachers were instructed by the district not to talk with the news media.

According to an outside investigation commissioned by the school, several students had filed complaints that the girl had threatened and bullied them over the previous days. She was among roughly 50 students assigned a special one-day workshop designed to build empathy and connection, held in the gym.

But at 1:27 p.m., she was in the lobby and heading toward the stairway to the cafeteria, where the students who filed the complaints against her were eating lunch. Mr. Sanchez moved to stop her. Three video cameras captured parts of the scene, but each missed key actions.

The videos, which have no sound, show the two making contact in front of the stairway doors, Mr. Sanchez slightly taller and considerably stockier. Their hands are mostly obscured. For about 20 seconds they jostle in front of the doors, then move through them, as other students gather to look.

Mr. Sanchez, holding a laptop in his right arm, appears to block or hold the student with his left, as they move toward a wall not visible to two of the cameras. For the last 20 seconds of the interaction the only view is from a lower camera, which shows only their feet. Finally another student seems to lead the girl back through the doors and away from the scene. Mr. Sanchez returns to the lobby.

In her affirmative action complaint, filed a month after the encounter, the student wrote that she had left the workshop to use the restroom when Mr. Sanchez grabbed her and accused her of bullying other students. When she tried to get out of his grip, she wrote, “he pushed me against the wall.” She added: “Mr. Sanchez should be held accountable for wrongly accusing me, and physically grabbing me. This should not be the way he disciplines students.”

Mr. Sanchez’s union lawyer, Robert Schwartz, said, “The video is the best evidence, and it doesn’t support the charges.” He added: “I’ve been doing this for a long time, and it’s not unusual for an administrator who breaks up a fight to then have the kid accuse him of something. That happens.”

The New Jersey Department of Education leaves it up to school districts to set policies for when school officials may physically engage students. In the South Orange-Maplewood district, staff members may use “reasonable and necessary” force to “quell a disturbance” that threatens physical harm to others, according to the district’s policy manual.

Police documents from Mr. Sanchez’s arrest describe him “pushing and/or shoving and/or grabbing” the girl, “causing her to sustain injury.” In her statement to the prosecutor, she said she was bruised during the encounter.

Mr. Fields, from the Black Parents Workshop, said the circumstances leading up to the confrontation were beside the point. “I don’t care where the young lady was going,” he said. “No adult has a right to physically accost a student. I think those are excuses being made for Mr. Sanchez’s behavior.”

As the academic year wound down, Ms. Malespina and the Black Parents Workshop campaigned against renewing Mr. Sanchez’s contract, citing the student’s affirmative action complaint, along with an “increasing number of fights” and students feeling unsafe, according to an email Ms. Malespina sent to the superintendent and school board president.

At a packed year-end board meeting last May, a few dozen students and parents, including a current and former mayor of Maplewood, argued for retaining Mr. Sanchez. “Frank Sanchez is the best thing to happen to our district in the 13 years I’ve lived here,” said one mother, Stephanie Nasteff Pilato. A decision to fire him, she said, “would be a catastrophe.”

Mr. Davis, who spoke against retaining Mr. Sanchez at the meeting, sees the support for him, and the unwillingness to believe a Black student, as revealing. “These towns purport to be extremely progressive and extremely inclusive,” he said in an interview. “So they’re saying this girl was in a fight. She was a troublemaker. She was a thug. And I said, ‘What does that matter?’” He added: “They’re so determined to protect this principal that for whatever reason, they will put their — I’ll call it pseudo-progressive liberalism — aside to meet their own objectives.”

The board voted in May to retain Mr. Sanchez, but the showdown left wounds in the community. Several Black parents said that Mr. Davis’s group did not speak for them.

“This is an effort to advocate for Black children by burning up the entire system,” said Khalil Gibran Muhammad, a parent who supports Mr. Sanchez. “These folks have played very aggressively and unfairly with people’s lives to try to score political points. And this is an escalation, in my opinion, that is very dangerous and crosses the line.”

A Flawed Investigation, Then Another

In fall 2023, the school hired an outside law firm, Cooper Levenson, to investigate the student’s affirmative action complaint. It delivered its report last December, nine months after the confrontation, finding that Mr. Sanchez had used “excessive” force to restrain the girl, and that he seemed “to have lost his temper and escalated rather than de-escalated the situation.” The report noted that two assistant principals and two students told investigators that Mr. Sanchez had a pattern of “taking harsher disciplinary measures against females, and particularly Black females.” It recommended that the district “consider appropriate consequences” for Mr. Sanchez.

But there was a problem with the report, said Courtney Winkfield, who was on the school board at the time. “The investigator’s supervisor personally called our board attorney and told them to halt on doing anything with this report,” Ms. Winkfield said. “He said specifically that the investigator did not follow standard operating procedure, did not submit his draft report for review to him.”

Nonetheless, on Dec. 27, according to police records, Ms. Malespina called the police to share the report’s findings. The Maplewood Police Department gathered the videos and incident reports from the school and began its own investigation — this time not into civil charges of bias but criminal charges of assault. Ms. Malespina, whose term on the school board ended in January, declined an interview request.

The school district commissioned Cooper Levinson to do a second investigation, and placed Mr. Sanchez on administrative leave pending its results.

On March 7, Cooper Levinson delivered its revised report, noting that the first one “should have been deemed a draft report only and subject to revision, change and further peer review.” The revised report cleared Mr. Sanchez of all charges from the affirmative action complaint and recommended that he be reinstated. It found Mr. Sanchez’s description of the episode credible, and cast doubt on the student’s, adding that there was no record to support the charges of bias in his treatment of Black girls. “Security video,” the investigator wrote, “does not demonstrate that Principal Sanchez engaged in behavior unbecoming a public school official.”

The report also noted that Mr. Sanchez “could have engaged in better de-escalation techniques,” for which it recommended that the school provide more training.

But if the report seemed to vindicate Mr. Sanchez, it brought him little comfort. On the same day he learned of the findings, he was called to turn himself in to the county prosecutor. If convicted of assault and endangering a child, he faces a prison term of up to 10 years.

At a school board meeting two weeks later, a half-dozen mothers, wearing red to support Mr. Sanchez, held up signs and took turns reading aloud from the report of the second outside investigation, to rounds of applause from other supporters. Gwyneth Brown, a student representative on the board, said students felt “unconnected” and “very, very lost.”

No one spoke against Mr. Sanchez.

The Teachers’ Dilemma

For educators everywhere, the criminal prosecution of Mr. Sanchez for an action that schools typically handle using their own disciplinary codes opens up new levels of potential risk. Fights are part of high school life. If a school official can be not just disciplined but also jailed for intervening to break up or prevent a fight, what are teachers supposed to do?

In an interview, Mr. Sanchez mentioned a fight last year in which a teacher told the students to stop but did not physically separate them. “And the parent was just so upset when they saw the video, like, ‘Why isn’t this person stopping it?’” he said. “And to be honest, I was a little upset, too. I didn’t say that to the parent, but I did say, ‘Well, because sometimes people are worried about liability.’”

The implications of Mr. Sanchez’s arrest extend far beyond South Orange and Maplewood, said Christopher Emdin , a professor of science education at Teachers College, Columbia University, who has written extensively about race and education .

“The nature of schools is that uncomfortable interactions happen,” Dr. Emdin said. In districts with a history of racial litigation, he added, “there’s a tendency to blow things out of proportion and to attach what happens oftentimes during the school day to race and racism. And that’s dangerous for Black kids who are undergoing legitimate racist practices in contemporary schools. Teachers can’t act effectively if they’re fearful that their actions are going to be misconstrued as racist.”

Other students at the school may feel a different effect, said Monique Couvson, author of “ Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools ,” who cites research that Black girls’ conduct is disproportionately likely to be met with force. For those who witness such uses of force, she said, “it sends a message that their anger or their quote-unquote attitude is not a valid expression of a form of harm that they might be experiencing.”

In South Orange and Maplewood, bright red “Friends of Frank” signs have sprung up on neighborhood lawns. A crowdfunding campaign to pay Mr. Sanchez’s legal bills has raised more than $60,000.

At Columbia High School, the Board of Education’s lawyer met for two hours with faculty members after Mr. Sanchez’s arrest to discuss what teachers could and could not do when students are fighting or are threatening to. “The entire room was on pins and needles,” said Amy Biasucci, who has taught A.P. biology and environmental science at the school for 15 years. The meeting was clarifying, she said, but did not dispel teachers’ fears.

“We make tens of thousands of micro-decisions on a daily basis,” she said. “And it is very scary to think that someone could take a micro-decision out of context and you could now go to jail for that. Your life could be ruined after literally giving your entire life to public service. It’s excruciating.”

Mr. Sanchez remains on paid administrative leave, with his next court date scheduled for June.

Taylor Robinson contributed reporting.

Read by John Leland

Audio produced by Jack D’Isidoro .

John Leland is a reporter covering life in New York City for The Times. More about John Leland

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