Joanna
What specific systems of law and punishment do you have in mind here? Ancient Athens sentenced people to be stoned to death, thrown off cliffs, and bound on stakes until dead, in addition of course to compulsory suicide. Violent punishments were always the flip side in pre-modern societies of more civilized measures like exile, confiscation of property, and ostracism. Did any pre-capitalist societies not make use of either confinement or violent punishment? Or is it that modern-day prisons are worse than torture and execution?