The measure of a society is it's criminal justice system, and people have realised a long time ago that they need a system of sanctions and penalties that will discipline and affect socially undesirable behavior. Punishing undesirable behavior had changed over time. In the beginning punishment was left to the afflicted individuals by the taolin principle "eye for eye, tooth for a tooth", but late it got in the hands of the community and the country. The concept of a criminal offense had changed depending on the social structures, moral and religious systems and depending on the goods that the society protected. The laws which defined what a criminal offense is and what the punishment should be, until the seventeenth century were theocratic and were tied with the "implementing the will of God“, but after the Enlightenment criminal justice systems become more secular. Brutal punishment reached its culmination in the Middle Ages, but after that some forms of it had completely disappeared and the punishments became less and less oriented on hurting the human body. The need for understanding the longing to brake the law appeared, and psychology and other sciences started to research psycho-social impacts on the construction of the personality of convicts.