An Exploration Towards The Rational Economic Sanctioning
An Exploration Towards The Rational Economic Sanctioning
An Exploration Towards The Rational Economic Sanctioning
DEPOK
2018
There is a increased tendency of global interest with regards to alternative
sanctions or punishments outside of those who are labelled as “cruel and unusual”
considering the huge amount of academic attention towards effectiveness of
incapacitation, rehabilitation and other forms of alternative sentencing such as
probation, community service and pre-adjudication diversions (Nagin, 2013).
Economic or monetary sanctions, despite its long history of its inclusion as one of
the earliest non-“cruel and unusual” punishments applicable to American, Chinese
and Saudi Arabian society, does not enjoy comparable policing and research
attention in most, if not all modern civilizations (Miethe and Lu, 2005). The
majority of fines imposed by the American court, for instance, are for traffic
offences and thus the role of monetary sanctions in the American court is
relatively minimal (Hillsman, 1990). This paper seeks to explore the potential of
monetary sanctions as a punishment method that is rationally justified and
effective from a criminological point of view. Three primary notions of attention
of this paper: (1) the comparative historical development of monetary sanctions
substantially based on the work of Miethe and Lu, (2) the deterrent efficacies of
monetary sanctions, and (3) examples of successful applications of monetary
sanction as the primary means of punishment.
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punishment as mostly a ransom for the transgressor to ensure she/he attends the
court. The fundamental problem of the irrationality of economic sanctions is also
highlighted as early as the 18-th century, as quoted by Miethe and Lu, “…the rich
can elude justice by giving great bail …” which characterizes the inequality of
perceived severity of a punishment over different social and economic classes.
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Indonesia is in a uniquely intersectional position with regards to the three-
country comparison provided by Miethe and Lu in their book Punishment, of
which the original penal code is retained from a traditional colonial penal code
introduced by the Dutch Indies back in the 19th century while having significant
influences from its cultural circumstance as a Islam-dominated country with
heterogeneous citizens of various ethnicities (Mahy, 2013). Economic sanctions
are more likely prescribed as additional charges on top of serving their allocated
prison term or capital punishment, usually correlated to adjudications of traffic-
related, administrative and quite recently, on fraud and embezzlement offences
(e.g. corruption). The punitive nature as observed from the penal code of the
western world is strongly indicated and reflected in the Indonesian penal code,
even with all the revisions and amendments done by the government, with
implicit justifications for deterrent rationale and ideals.
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an increase in strictness for threshold determination of a drunk driver’s high blood
alcohol content with regards of the severity of punishment received by her/him is
significantly effective in reducing repeated offending or recidivism (Hansen,
2015).
The issue of unfairness and bias is arguably considered as one of the key
challenges in advocating the rational economic sanctions. A monetary value that
is assigned as the sanction for committing a specific transgression, for example,
might be severely debilitating for a working class family’s purchasing power
while an employer class family rationally might not bat an eye when confronted
with the same nominal value. Moreover, while the number of researches regarding
special deterrence of economic sanctions is steadily increasing, any significant
correlation with general deterrence effect is, at best, weakly observed due to the
insufficient knowledge of the actual punishment associated with a specific
criminal act; the impact of perceived risk of apprehension to general deterrence is
more significant (Apel, 2013). Therefore, rationalizing economic sanctions will
never be as effective as intended without the accompaniment of thorough
preparations and improvements with regards on the criminal justice system and its
actors.
Before starting off with the method utilized by the Western Europe countries,
a disclaimer is accordingly set: unequal distribution of income is strikingly
observed and majority of the criminals processed by the criminal justice system
originated from the lower end of the economic distribution (Townsend, 1979;
George and Lawson, 1980). The method of “day-fine” is designed in order to
introduce specific means into the charging of the economic sanctions. In order to
attain rationality in the application of the economic sanctioning scheme, the
sanction that is assigned to a specific criminal act is determined not only based on
the severity of the effect of the act committed, which will be translated into “day-
fine” units as a common standard in the uniform crime statistics, but also on the
income of the offender (Hillsman, 1990). Legal jurisprudence might be applicable
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for first half of the rationale, but not the latter, when considering that individual
situation and environment are unmistakably unique from one another.
Conclusion
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References
Hillsman, S. (1990). Fines and Day Fines. Crime and Justice, 12, 49-98.
Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1147438.
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