Are there any provisions for economic inequality in legal punishments?

Question

Suppose we have two persons, person-A and person-B and let's say they both commit the same crime and go to jail. The law, to my understanding, applies uniformly/punishes uniformly disregarding their economic class, status etc. But is this really fair? The person with greater resources could have a much smoother time serving their jail time and then reintegrating into society than the other person. Certainly, it must be unfair to punish/'serve justice' to all equally.

Hence, I ask, are there any provisions for this type of situation in current legal systems? What is the name for them if they exist?

Answer 1

Under German law, if you are sentenced to a fine because you committed a crime, that fine is measured in Tagessätze (day fine). One day worth of fines is the 30th part of your monthly income, adjusted according to the criminal's personal and economic situation. Basis for that is Criminal Code sec 40 (§ 40 StGB).

There is, however, no corresponding principle for prison sentences. The reasoning behind that is, that a wealthy person would hardly be able to "improve" their time in prison compared to a less wealthy one. In fact, they would "lose more money" in the meantime.

Answer 2

Economic inequality isn't explicitly considered in criminal sentencing in the United States, which is why it doesn't really have a name with which I am familiar.

The global circumstances of the offender may be considered in sentencing (over which judges, especially at the state level, have broad discretion).

Contrary to the intuition of the question, generally speaking, less well to do people tend to receive more harsh sentences, despite the economic stresses that they may have been facing, while more well to do people tend to receive more lenient sentences because they can promptly provide restitution, appear to have better prospects for rehabilitation, can afford to pay for alternative programs, and are more relatable to the average judge.

One way to think about property crimes (from a sort of political/legal theory sense) is that they exist mostly to discourage conduct committed by people who have no capacity to compensate the victims for out of pocket, making a civil lawsuit an inadequate incentive. Situations where the wrongdoer usually has the capacity to compensate victims for are usually characterized in the law as civil wrongs, while situations where the wrongdoer usually can't balance the scales with a proportionate monetary punishment are usually punished criminally.

Answer 3

In the U.S., fines may be reduced by a judge if the defendant is indigent and there exists several alternative means of prison so offenders can be released to work and return to jail for their non-work hours. These are usually allowed for low level offenses.

Answer 4

Sentencing someone to prison serves three purposes:

1. To punish the person for their offense
2. To deter others from committing that offense in the future
3. To protect society from that person committing the offense again

The time served/wasted is the punishment. Difficulty re-integrating into normal society is not part of the punishment. It's extremely difficult to predict or quantify, particularly for lengthy sentences, so trying to adjust it based on income would be a guess at best. It's also not clear that the length of the sentence is the significant contributing factor to this difficulty (reducing someone's 30 year sentence to 23 years won't help them much in that regard).

Reducing someone's prison sentence based on income would actively undermine the last two purposes. Poorer people would know that they'll only serve a partial sentence so the deterrent effect is diminished. The opposite - inflating the sentences of wealthy people - could lead to some excessive sentences that would most likely fall afoul of rules against cruel or excessive punishment. You don't want to end up with a system where a rich person spends more time in jail for getting into a bar fight than a poor person does for homicide. The severity of the offense rarely has anything to do with who the offender was.

Generally speaking, income isn't really a big factor into how likely someone is to re-offend, so society's need for protection from them doesn't really change based on how much money they have. We have decades of data on criminals and researchers have identified a number of factors that seem to be good indicators of how likely someone is to re-offend, such as the nature of the offense or the age of that person's first arrest. The parole system takes all of these factors into account and makes decisions to reduce people's sentences if they are deemed a low-enough risk.