ABSTRACT
Calls for a green criminology rarely spell out what a ‘green criminal justice’ system could look like. One option is for a focus on harms and their compensation to displace moral outrage and punishment. Following Jeremy Bentham’s nineteenth-century proposal we could give harms a money value, and focus ‘criminal’ justice on money compensation. It is a model that already dominates civil law where the focus is not on wrongdoers (or their pathologies and their corrections) but on compensation. Such compensation is predominantly covered and paid by insurance. As money sanctions in the form of fines already are the dominant criminal sanction, the envisaged shift is not so radical. A resource-greedy prison system is largely displaced, reserved for the few who are too dangerous to be at large. And a ‘science of criminals’ – itself resource greedy and with a lamentable history of class, race and gender discrimination – could be dispensed with.
