Over the past three decades, monetary sanctions have grown into one of the most significant, and largely overlooked, forms of criminal punishment in France. When I began my fieldwork in a French criminal court, I assumed I knew what monetary sanctions were and where to find them. Because I was studying how monetary sanctions are produced, I expected to find that process where it has most often been studied: in the courtroom. Drawing on established methods in sentencing research and courtroom ethnography, I planned to attend hearings, take detailed notes, and trace how judges, prosecutors, and defense lawyers produce sentencing decisions This approach is well suited to the study of custodial sentences. But when the analysis turns to monetary sanctions the process becomes more complex. A first complication is legal : the law does not classify these penalties under a single category : a fine punishes the convicted person; compensation redresses the harm suffered by the victim; court costs are added to the expenses of the proceedings; and mandatory programs require the offender to bear the cost of their own rehabilitation. For legal professionals, these different sums therefore retain distinct legal statuses. For convicted individuals, by contrast, these distinctions matter less than their cumulative effect: what ultimately matters to them is the total sum they are required to pay. This difference in perception helps explain why magistrates can say in interviews that they impose “very, very, very few monetary sanctions” even though they issue monetary sanctions on a daily basis: they do not necessarily understand these sanctions as parts of a single category. These early observations pointed to something more than a methodological difficulty: monetary sanctions are so deeply embedded in legal classifications and institutional routines that they become nearly invisible, even to those who produce them. Where, then, should they be observed?
The field site is not where you think it is
The first methodological insight was spatial: monetary sanctions do not happen in one place. Entirely outside any public judicial proceeding, a sanction may be drafted in a back office, typed up by a clerk, transmitted to an enforcement unit, and then referred to a collection agency. For example, many decisions about monetary sanctions are made long before the defendant appears in court, in the prosecutor’s office. There, junior prosecutors work in an open-plan workspace, spend much of their time on the phone, and often make decisions before examining the file in detail. One morning, amid a din of overlapping phone calls, an officer from the gendarmerie called in : “I’m calling about a roadside check. Twenty-three-year-old man, positive cannabis test. No prior record.” The deputy prosecutor did not look up from her screen. She wore a headset; a coffee mug sat nearby “Does he admit it?” she asked. “Yes.” “Okay. Penal order [ordonnance pénale]. Goodbye.” Only later did I come to understand what that decision entailed, and not from the prosecutor herself. She did not pause to consider its practical consequences. For her, “penal order [ordonnance pénale]” was simply an instruction given to the police officers on the phone. The case then passed, as a matter of routine, to the clerks and administrative staff responsible for carrying out the decision. These workers occupied less prestigious, more closely supervised positions. They were disproportionately women and more often came from working-class backgrounds, a social profile that contrasted sharply with that of the prosecutors they served. They translated the decision into concrete acts: they filed forms, updated databases, and initiated collection procedures. The prosecutor had said two words and then turned to the next case. Others were left to give those two words their full monetary weight: 300 euros in fines, 210 euros in analysis costs, and 62 euros in procedural fees. Monetary sanctions thus redistribute the work of implementation, away from decision-makers and onto lower-ranking staff, in ways that quietly accelerate judicial processing.
The prosecutor’s office illustrates one way monetary sanctions escape the courtroom. But even when they are formally imposed by a judge, they do not end with the verdict. Another case, drawn from a courtroom hearing, illustrates this point. After sentencing a defendant, the judge described the sentence to me in an interview as “a simple fine of 600 euros.” Yet this single figure did not reflect the full scope of what the defendant owed. To understand it, one must consider not only the compensation requested by the victim’s lawyer and the additional sums attached to the sentence, but also the enforcement procedures that follow — reminders, collection steps, and the risk of surcharges — each of which can alter the final amount owed. To study monetary sanctions, I had to follow cases from the prosecutor’s office to the hearing room, then to the clerk’s office, the sentence enforcement unit, and, eventually, the treasury’s collection services. At each stage, the sanction could change. It could be reformatted, revised, or, in some cases, quietly dropped from the record.
What the difficulty of access tells you
This difficulty in locating monetary sanctions reflects how legal professionals in France perceive these penalties. Although monetary sanctions have become highly significant, they remain symbolically marginal. This marginality has two sources. First, this marginality reflects a deep symbolic disavowal of money within the French legal culture, sustained by the historically constructed ideal of a so-called “free” justice system. Many legal professionals continue to contrast the French model with the supposedly mercantile model of American justice, which they associate with commercial logic and negotiated outcomes. Second, the hierarchy of punishments is structured primarily around custodial sentences. Since the abolition of the death penalty in 1981, imprisonment has functioned as the de facto apex of the sentencing hierarchy, relegating financial penalties and alternative measures to secondary positions. This hierarchy is clearly defined in law: the most serious offenses are punishable by prison sentences of more than ten years; intermediate offenses by prison sentences of up to ten years, often combined with a fine; and minor offenses by a fine alone. Compensation, for its part, is frequently awarded in criminal proceedings, but it formally belongs to civil law. Although compensation is sometimes perceived by victims and practitioners as more meaningful than a fine, it remains formally peripheral within the criminal sanction framework. Some of the judges I interviewed questioned whether fines should be considered punishments at all. It is, in part, precisely because these penalties are perceived as less serious that they tend to be produced in spaces that attract little public or institutional scrutiny. Studying monetary sanctions therefore requires following the penalty wherever it travels, from the courtroom to the clerk’s office, from the oral decision to the administrative record, from the judgment to the collection agency.
References
Delbrel, Sophie (ed.). Le Prix de la justice. Histoire et perspectives. Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2013.
Harris, Alexes. A Pound of Flesh: Monetary Sanctions as Punishment for the Poor. Russell Sage Foundation, 2016.
Martin, Karin D., Bryan L. Sykes, Sarah Shannon, Frank Edwards and Alexes Harris. “Monetary Sanctions: Legal Financial Obligations in US Systems of Justice”. Annual Review of Criminology, 1 (2018) : 471-495.
Wajnsztok, Hugo. La monnaie judiciaire : une étude sur les sanctions pécuniaires en procédure pénale. PhD dissertation in sociology, École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, 2023.