Structural Injustices in Germany's Day Fines System
An Overview of Findings from the Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School
From 2018-2019, the Criminal Justice Policy Program at Harvard Law School (CJPP), in partnership with the Institute for Criminology at the University of Cologne, conducted interviews with over 50 judges and prosecutors to learn about how Germany’s system of day fines works in practice. At the time of the research, CJPP’s goal was to understand whether day fines, a system of proportionate financial sanctions in which criminal legal system fines are set to people’s economic circumstances, were a model for the US. CJPP released this report in June 2020 critically analyzing whether day fines met their goal of increasing the fairness of fines.
The report identified serious problems with Germany’s day fines system that called into question day fines as a reform for the US, and also suggested the need for significant changes to Germany’s system. For this reason, the Justice Collective is re-releasing the CJPP report for a German audience, with a new introduction identifying key areas in need of change in Germany. The hope is that this report will inform policy discussions in Germany, where fines make up approximately 85% of all criminal sentences.
In this new introduction (and in the full report), we discuss three key issues: how ability to pay is defined, how financial information is gathered and used to set fines, and the types of offenses punished with fines.
Taken together the findings suggest the need for a drastic rethinking of fines in the German system: Day fines punish people for poverty or other social issues that could be solved with non-punitive sanctions, and are imposed in ways that prioritize efficiency at the expense of truly accounting for people’s financial situations.