Criminal-Legal System Actors’ Practices and Views on Day Fines

Abstract

To date, no empirical studies have examined how judges and prosecutors set day fine amounts in the German criminal-legal system. Day fines provide a systematic way to set monetary sanctions with the intended result of more equality among people with different incomes; this is because the fine is based on the nature of the offense and the financial circumstances of the person being sentenced. To fill this research gap, we conducted focus groups with judges and prosecutors to learn their practices for sentencing day fines, including what financial information they have about people and how they calculate the fine. We also asked interviewees about their views of the system’s fairness. In this paper we discuss our findings about how judges and prosecutors set the amount of the daily unit, that is, the unit calculated to tailor fines to people’s financial circumstance. We show that judges and prosecutors frequently lack information about people’s financial circumstances and instead estimate the daily rate. These estimates vary by person and place, as does the way decision makers account for people’s circumstances via deductions from their gross income to arrive at a daily rate. These inconsistencies result in daily rates that do not reflect people’s financial circumstances and have a profound effect on those who are being fined. We then focus on one explanation as to why judges fail to exercise discretion to set fines that truly account for people’s circumstances: We found that judges and prosecutors fail to grasp the implications of poverty and therefore set fines that are too high. In our conclusion, we raise questions about the implications of this research for reform in Germany and for guiding U.S. jurisdictions about day fines as a possible solution for their issues of high fees and fines.