ABSTRACT
The relationship between crime and the social environment has been the subject of frequent investigation ever since the studies of Quetelet, A. and Georg von Mayr. Although the sociology of crime has been receiving more and more attention, methods of punishment and their historical development have rarely been studied from a historical approach. When checking to the positive conditioning factors, people see that the mere statement that specific forms of punishment correspond to a given stage of economic development is a truism. It is self-evident that enslavement as a form of punishment is impossible without a slave economy, that prison labor is impossible without manufacture or industry, that monetary fines for all classes of society are impossible without a money economy. The chapter describes that fiscal motives have shaped the typical punishment of modern society, the fine, both in its rise and in its form.
