By Jay Gormley

• Criminal fines are the most common criminal sanction and account for about 75% of principal sanctions issued by courts. As a principal sanction, fines are most commonly used for relatively less serious offences where an out of court disposal (OOCD) or discharge is not appropriate or possible. However, fines can also be used as a complementary sanction to another disposal - such as a community order for more serious offences.

• There is a need for the law to provide better clarity concerning the most appropriate role for criminalisation. Most notably, there could be better clarity about the relationship between criminal fines issued by courts and non-criminal fines issued by criminal justice personnel (e.g. police officers and prosecutors) by way of an OOCD.

• In the past, defaulting on a fine frequently resulted in the next step being a custodial sentence. Today, other sentencing disposals have to be considered first, ameliorating this issue. However, currently, there is no available data on how many people default on a fine, are given another order (e.g. a community order) which they also fail to comply with, and are ultimately given a custodial sentence for what was initially a finable offence. This matter requires urgent clarification and it should also be investigated whether it contributes to the high number of short custodial sentences.

• Fines, more than any other disposal, raise questions of fairness given the socio-economic inequality in society. Without care, fines risk disproportionately punishing the poor who may suffer more from a fine of a given amount. The Sentencing Council provides crucial guidance in this respect, but it could be taken further.
London: Sentencing Academy, 2022. 20p.

By Philip Bean

From the Preface: In 1976 I wrote Rehabilitation and Deviance as an intended polemic against the then prevailing view that rehabilitation was the only acceptable and humanitarian means of dealing with offenders. It brought forth from those who supported rehabilitation a considerable amount of hostility but no real debate. It was almost as if rehabilitation had become a belief system which was open to challenge only from the non-believers. However, in the last f o u ryears the subject matter has movedon a great deal, and it seems now as if the time is right to produce a less polemical and wider view of the issues involved in punishment. What follows therefore i san attempt to examine the major arguments relating to punishment, to show how those arguments relate to justice, and to show how a penal system would operate if any of those argumentsdominated. There is also a concluding chapter on the punishment of children - an area neglected by traditional forms of philosophical inquiry but now assuming increasing importance. The book is written mainly from a philosophical standpoint, for ti seemed to me that criminology must draw on its philosophical foundations fi ti is to continue its development. It also seemed as fi the argument about punishment was a moral one requiring constant justification.

London. Oxford. 1981. 222p. CONTAINS MARK-UP