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When the State Kills . . .: The Death Penalty—A Human Rights Issue (1989) revealed an ancient forerunner of Amnesty International’s worldwide campaign against the death penalty in citing the earliest recorded parliamentary opposition to capital punishment, Diodotus’s claim in 427 b.c.e. Greece that execution is not an effective deterrent to crime. Sixteenth century critics of capital punishment objected to the widespread penalties of burning, beheading, hanging, and drawing and quartering that were imposed for more than two hundred offenses. Preindustrial societies in the Middle Ages substituted banishment or mutilation for execution, and the first prisons opened in the sixteenth century. Reformers such as Jeremy Bentham successfully worked to reduce the number of capital offenses in England to four by 1861.