Fines

The fine is one of the oldest penal sanctions in history. According to Bonneville de Marsangy (1864: 260), “There was even a time where all the sanctions were fines.” The first form of human justice was the idea of simple vengeance, an eye for an eye. After this, the idea of compensation and reparation of the “prejudice” (the injury or damage) appeared. In numerous legal systems, money compensation replaced private vengeance. In Rome, the fine was considered the main penal sanction, whereas imprisonment was only a particular kind of torture. During the sixth century, the Germans created a system with two kinds of sanctions: the wergild and the fredum. The wergild represented the compensation given to the victim and/or to the victim's family to avoid their private vengeance. The fredum was a certain amount of money to be paid to the authorities to diminish the public trouble caused by the crime and to make sure that the authorities enact the “peace treaty” concluded by the payment of the wergild. According to some authors, the fredum is the forerunner of the current fine system, the wergild having lost its importance through the centuries. However, other historians think that today's fines are the result of a progressive junction of fredum and wergild.

Wherever the truth may be, today's fine system seems to have many advantages. Contrary to imprisonment, it does not take the condemned person away from his or her family; it does not push him or her to give up working; it does not cost society a lot of money and may even be lucrative. But every coin has a flip side: Fining privileges the rich to the prejudice of the poor, gives the idea that one can buy impunity and the right to commit crimes, and affects not only the offender but also his or her whole family.