Voltaire; this was the basis of the English edition. In England, Beccaria influenced Jeremy Bentham, who proposed a modern penitentiary or Panopticon.

The Enlightenment emphasis on reason is evident in Beccaria’s recommendations, which advocate for a more rational approach to judgment and punishment. Along with arguing against the death penalty, which he categorized as murder, he suggests sweeping penal reform.

An example of a book in which literary criticism influenced judicial reform directly or indirectly include Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song and, along that same line, Jack Abbott's book In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison. As Mailer was doing research in preparation of writing his book The Executioner's Song, Jack Abbott, who himself was incarcerated at the time, reached out to offer his assistance in detailing a first-person description of prison life.

The two men formed a friendship, and Mailer wrote a laudatory review of Abbott's book that might have helped secure his parole and release from prison. Shortly after Abbott was released, he killed a total stranger in what still appears to have been a random act of violence.

Their books coupled with Abbott's crime resulted in a shift to the right of popular feelings about judicial reform that might have indirectly have affected judicial reform and also might have reinforced New York legislation prohibiting a perpetrator from benefiting from publishing writings about his or her crimes, the "Son of Sam law." The "Son of Sam law" was enacted in 1977. It prohibits convicted criminals from profiting from their crimes by writing books and/or entering into movie deals.

Specifically, after he was convicted of the murder, Abbott wrote another book, My Return, that he published in 1986. Four years later, the widow of the man he had murdered filed a lawsuit against him seeking $10 million in damages that led to a jury award of nearly $8 million in damages for the family of Abbott's victim.