Industrial Prison Complex

I'm not at all comfortable with the imposition of criminal fines. I'm a big fan of restitution, and I definitely think that the state should require criminals to make restitutionary payments to injured parties whenever money reasonably could be said to help make whole the damages inflicted by the crimes at issue. However, the purity and the integrity of [the instinct toward] retribution is compromised whenever a criminal's money goes into the state's coffers. The polity should want payback so badly that it's willing to pay for it, and the collective financial burden of incarceration keeps us all honest. In my opinion, a criminal fine smacks of blackmail: "we caught you dead to rights, but cut us a check and then we can all just forget about it and move on." It's sleazy. I think we should abolish criminal fines, and criminals who require punishment should go to jail.

The abolition of criminal fines wouldn't have much effect upon the lives of natural people with criminal inclinations and deviant personalities. Imprisonment upon conviction has always been the fate of poor criminals, and those few rich criminals who can't manage to avoid charges altogether can usually beat the rap in the end, at least on appeal. The real impact of banning fines would hit our corporate citizens.

Every state (as well as the federal government) could have a massive office building, a skyscraper of corporate corrections, and corporations whose crimes were egregious enough to warrant criminal sanction could serve out sentences in these penal offices. Each offending corporation would get a fairly sized suite of offices, rent-free. The corporation being punished could staff and equip its suite however it saw fit, but for the duration of its sentence it could not conduct business within that jurisdiction unless it did so within the confines of its suite. It would be a crime for any natural person to serve as the corporation's agent outside of the suite, and anyone caught illegally acting or transacting on the corporate convict's behalf would go to regular, human jail. (And, of course, any corporation caught illegally acting as the agent of a corporate convict would get its own rent-free suite of offices in the industrial prison complex.)

Doing away with criminal fines certainly wouldn't stimulate our precarious economy...in fact, quite the opposite. But prosperity without justice produces the wickedest of dividends, and a society must be willing to suffer for righteousness if it wants to consider itself enlightened.