These reforms continue the rationalization of punishment that is a prominent theme in sociological-historical studies of social control appear¬ing from the 1970s onwards (Spitzer 1983). On this reading, developments such as regular paid police forces, a professional judiciary, rules of evidence and due process, penal codes with graduated punishments, the move from torture, mutilation and death to imprisonment and fines, are not so much progress in humanitarianism as progress in bureaucratized rationalism, necessary to meet the social control needs and legitimacy conditions of modern societies.