In the present paper the author is presenting the ideas singled out in C. Beccaria’s Treatise on offences and punishments, which allowed rapid transformations in the national penal systems. C. Beccaria’s ideas have served as a basis to the appearance and spreading of a preventive model of the anti-violation social reaction. From the point of view of the representatives of the preventive model, the sanction system has a limited importance in preventing delinquency, more important being the measures of social and economic order, which could more efficiently eliminate or limit the role of criminogenic factor.