Re:U.S. Files Criminal Charges Against Theranos’s Elizabeth ...
by masklinn on Saturday June 16, 2018 @05:57AM
(#17326787)
> The idea of jail is that your personal freedom is taken away as punishment for a number of days.
In fact, the finnish fining above is a system of day-fine: the sentence is expressed in day-fine, each "day" of the fine is multiplied by the offender's day-fine factor (baseline is about half the daily disposable income — daily income after taxes & basic living allowance) and that yields the fine's actual amount.
For court-ordered fines of sufficient size they can also be converted to a prison sentence at a ratio of 3 day-fine to 1 day in prison (rounded down).
How much opportunity cost those days have, or how much money you lose as a result of your jail time, is irrelevant. The punishment is taking away your personal freedom.
Jail time is a fair punishment: Nobody likes having their freedom taken from them. There is no need to scale it.
But its different for fines. If you drive a 100k€ car, you're not going to give a shit about a 50€ fine for speeding. And my personal experience seems to suggest this is true: Drivers of expensive cars often ignore speed limits and "no parking" signs.
So one thing we could do is add a mandatory jail sentence for speeding. You drive to fast, you go to jail for a day. But that seems a bit harsh, so maybe we stick with the fine, but make it so that it also hurts people who make a lot of money.