PAYING FOR CRIME

As I said in an earlier post, living in a foreign country sometimes throws up surprises. I had always thought Denmark to be a fairly liberal sort of place; so it was a shock to find out about the following.

People convicted of a crime here have to reimburse the authorities for the cost of the prosecution. Not the direct expenses of the police or the public prosecutor, but those of pretty much everything else; defence lawyers (there is no concept of the Public Defender, who advises people who have no money), medical examinations, technical and financial investigations, and so on. Some of these can be very expensive. Apparently, this financial burden is one of the highest in Europe.

The job of collecting these monies has been given to the tax authorities. According to them, some 60,000 people owed some Kr.2 billion at the end of 2012.  

What constitutes a crime varies from country to country and is decided by society as a whole (via its legislative representatives). As such, prosecuting a crime is the ultimate "public good"; society pays for such prosecution, and dictates possible fines and/or imprisonment, in order to show its collective disapproval of the behaviour in question. Against that background, forcing people to pay for the decision to give punishment as well as undergoing the punishment itself, strikes me as morally wrong.

More prosaically, it also strikes me as short-sighted in the extreme. Because one of the consequences is that people leaving prison after serving their sentence are often crippled by having to service a large debt; indeed, the greater the crime and the longer the sentence, the bigger the likely bill. A prisoner, having paid his or her debt to society and wishing to make a fresh start, is merely allowed the opportunity to start paying to the state. And at a time of their lives when they are least likely to have either assets or job prospects. Seen in that light, is it surprising that so many of them take up a life of crime again?

This was a disappointing discovery.

Walter Blotscher