Patricia Faraldo Cabana

The project aims to understand the social functions and consequences of the most important alternative to imprisonment in Western societies in times of the collapse of the Welfare state and the transformation of social control forms: the penal fine. Monetary penalties and compensations are ubiquitous. They outnumber any other sanctions delivered by criminal justice in many European countries. In a monetized society, in which money is increasingly available and all objects can be exchanged for money, fine takes on a new meaning, which will be investigated in the context of this project. In this respect, under the concept monetized justice the project explores the view that contemporary penal governance is less concerned with disciplining individuals or corporations and more concerned with regulating distributions and flows of behaviours and the problems and costs linked with these. The concept monetized justice examines the implications of the “monetization of justice” as consumer societies are increasingly regulated through this single medium. To this end, the project will take an interdisciplinary approach between the fields of criminal justice, criminology and criminal policy, assigning a relevant role to history and sociology and offering a multidisciplinary and comparative perspective.

The main purpose is to anatomize the past and contemporary practice on penal fine, revealing the ways in which its modes of exercising power depend upon specific ways of thinking (rationalities) and specific ways of acting (technologies), as well as upon specific ways of ‘subjectifying’ individuals, not only criminals, and governing populations. The project will also problematize these practices of governing, located in a variety of different sites, by subjecting them to a ‘genealogical’ analysis, tracing their historical lineage in order not only to understand why and how we arrived to the present situation, but also what the future development could be. By doing so, the analysis aims to isolate programmes, rationalities and technologies, and investigate the forms of discourse, knowledge and subjectivity that these entail. Penal policy is not formulated in a vacuum, but neither is it always or necessarily the product of a coherent and consistent consensus. Any understanding of change or innovation in penal law should therefore involve a historically informed appreciation of the situation, and of the often conflicting pressures which confront scholars, thinkers, and policy-makers.