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"Theorizing Fines"

By Douglas A. Berman

The title of this post is the title of this new piece I just noticed on SSRN from Professor Pat O'Malley of the University of Sydney.  Here is the abstract: Given their central place as a sanction in criminal justice, the virtual absence of a theoretical literature on them is a serious deficit. The paper reviews the principal contributions to date, and argues that they suffer from a misleading conviction that sanctions are driven by production relations. To begin with, this seriously underestimates the impact of penal discourses and practice, which can better account for variations in the rise, uneven distribution and recent decline in fines' dominance as a punishment. Equally important is the failure to consider the nexus between the rise of the modern regulatory fine (for example 'on the spot' fines) and the rise of consumer societies...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on September 17, 2009 (boomark / email).