ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a comparative overview of the main codifications of general criminal law in both countries, the French and German Criminal Codes and the Codes of Criminal Procedure. The comparison focuses on sanctions and sentencing as well as the pathway from the suspicion of an offence to the pronouncement of a sanction. Despite an intertwined legal history and shared basic legal concepts, there are very different styles of legislation and different approaches to the same problems in the two countries, which can be understood as valuable testaments to differences in the underlying understanding of punishment. Still, these differences may not suffice to explain the differing developments of key Figures in criminal justice statistics as presented in Chapter 3.
