"With the cooperation of Marianne Breijer, Erasmus University Rotterdam."

Day fines, as a pecuniary sanction, have a great potential to reduce inequality in the criminal sentencing system, as they impose the same relative punishment on all offenders irrespective of their income. Furthermore, with correct implementation, they can constitute an alternative sanction to the more repressive and not always efficient short-term prison sentences. Finally, by independently expressing in the sentence the severity and the income of the offender, day fines can increase uniformity and transparency of sentencing. Having this in mind, almost half of the European Union countries have adopted day fines in their criminal justice system. For the first time, this book makes their findings accessible to a wider international audience. Aimed at scholars, policy makers and criminal law practitioners, it provides an opportunity to learn about the theoretical advantages, the practical challenges, the successes and failures, and ways to improve.

Fines have numerous advantages as a criminal sanction. They impose minor costs on the society and compliance leads to an increase of the state revenue. Furthermore, fines have no criminogenic effect as prisons do. However, the potential of this sanction is not fully exploited due to income variation among offenders. Sanctions must impose an equal burden on offenders who commit similar crimes. Yet in practice, low fines are insufficiently punitive to deter and punish wealthy offenders. And high fines are unaffordable for low-income offenders. As a result, fines are imposed only for minor offenses. On the contrary, day-fines allow imposing an equal relative burden of punishment, while assuring the offender is capable of complying with the pecuniary sanction. This is possible due to the special structure of day-fines, which separates the decision on the severity of the crime and the financial state of the offender. Such structure enables expanding the categories of offenses that can be dealt with pecuniary sanctions. Day-fines can offer a partial solution for the American prison-overcrowding problem. Therefore, the aim of this article is twofold. First, to provide a comparative analysis of day-fines in Europe. This analysis includes an exhaustive depiction of all the day-fine models that are currently implemented in Europe. Second, this article examines for the first time some of the challenges in transplanting day-fines into the U.S. criminal justice system, i.e. the constitutional restriction on Excessive Fines and the suitability of this model of fines to the American 'uniformity revolution in sentencing'

This publication examines the rules in force in Europe governing prisons and the treatment of prisoners, including the use of force, the selection of prison staff and the protection of prisoners' human rights, based on Recommendation Rec (2006) 2 on the European Prison Rules (which was adopted by the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe in January 2006). It contains the text of the recommendation with a detailed commentary on it, together with a report which considers recent developments and analyses the effectiveness of these rules and of imprisonment as a form of punishment.

This report provides planning and implementation guidance for jurisdictions planning to use structured fines (day fines) as part of their overall sentencing system. It explains the concept of structured fines and explains their potential benefits, including offender accountability, deterrence, and fairness, effective and efficient use of limited system resources, revenue, and credibility of the court. Experience with structured fines in Europe and the United States is also described. Additional sections explain how to set goals and priorities, develop a unit scale that ranks offenses by severity, calculate the amounts of fines, and impose the structured fine sentence. (NCJRS, modified).

This publication contains a number of papers which highlight examples of good practice in relation to criminal policy in member states of the Council of Europe, set out under the headlines of: crime prevention, mediation and other community sanctions, the prison system, and criminal procedure. Many of the papers are written by members of the Criminological Scientific Council of the Council of Europe (CSC).

The presentation of Europe's immediate historical past has quite dramatically changed. Conventional depictions of occupation and collaboration in World War II, of wartime resistance and post-war renewal, provided the familiar backdrop against which the chronicle of post-war Europe has mostly been told. Within these often ritualistic presentations, it was possible to conceal the fact that not only were the majority of people in Hitler's Europe not resistance fighters but millions actively co-operated with and many millions more rather easily accommodated to Nazi rule. Moreover, after the war, those who judged former collaborators were sometimes themselves former collaborators. Many people became innocent victims of retribution, while others--among them notorious war criminals--escaped punishment. Nonetheless, the process of retribution was not useless but rather a historically unique effort to purify the continent of the many sins Europeans had committed. This book sheds light on the collective amnesia that overtook European governments and peoples regarding their own responsibility for war crimes and crimes against humanity--an amnesia that has only recently begun to dissipate as a result of often painful searching across the continent. In inspiring essays, a group of internationally renowned scholars unravels the moral and political choices facing European governments in the war's aftermath: how to punish the guilty, how to decide who was guilty of what, how to convert often unspeakable and conflicted war experiences and memories into serviceable, even uplifting accounts of national history. In short, these scholars explore how the drama of the immediate past was (and was not) successfully "overcome." Through their comparative and transnational emphasis, they also illuminate the division between eastern and western Europe, locating its origins both in the war and in post-war domestic and international affairs. Here, as in their discussion of collaborators' trials, the authors lay bare the roots of the many unresolved and painful memories clouding present-day Europe. Contributors are Brad Abrams, Martin Conway, Sarah Farmer, Luc Huyse, László Karsai, Mark Mazower, and Peter Romijn, as well as the editors. Taken separately, their essays are significant contributions to the contemporary history of several European countries. Taken together, they represent an original and pathbreaking account of a formative moment in the shaping of Europe at the dawn of a new millennium.

Money is the most frequently means used in the legal system to punish and regulate. Monetary penalties outnumber all other sanctions delivered by criminal justice in many jurisdictions, imprisonment included. More people pay fines than go to prison and in some jurisdictions many of those in prison are there because of failure to pay their fines. Therefore, it is surprising how little has been written in the Anglophone academic world about the nature of money sanctions and their specific characteristics as legal sanctions. In many ways, legal innovations related to money sanctions have been poorly understood. This book argues that they are a direct consequence of the changing meaning of money. Considering the ‘meaninglessness’ of modern money, the book aims to examine the history of changing conceptions in how fines have been conceived and used. Using a set of interpretative techniques sensitive to how money and freedom are perceived, the genealogy of the penal fine is presented as a story of constant reformulation in response to shifting political pressures and changes in intellectual developments that influenced ideological commitments of legislators and practitioners. This book is multi-disciplinary and will appeal to those engaged with criminology, sociology and philosophy of punishment, socio-legal studies, and criminal law.