ABSTRACT

Considering the massive use of fines in criminal law, it is surprising how little scholars write about the nature of money punishments and of their specific characteristics as legal sanctions. Indeed, until recently we have only been able to find no more than a handful of generally recognized attempts to think about fines in terms of socio-legal theory. One of these theorizations was Georg Rusche and Otto Kirchheimer’s brief venture to analyse the fine in terms of Marxist theory, included in Punishment and Social Structure (New York 1939). Rusche and Kirchheimer were convinced that fines would only develop into a major sanction when poor people could afford to pay them, since the application of fines has its natural limits in the material conditions of the lower strata of the 88population. Moreover, they argued that during periods of depression, the fine becomes less feasible, and consequently short terms of imprisonment become more prevalent. Using their insightful work to establish a dialog, my intent with this chapter is to discuss if the basic premise of the political economy of punishment is applicable to the fine. As a touchstone, I will use data from two European countries, one, Germany, hard hit by the economic recession of 1929, and the other, Spain, by the financial crisis of 2008, to analyse if the extent to which the fine can be used is influenced by economic depressions or not.