Regulatory Fines as an Instrument of Bureaucratic Repression

• In Event: Predicting Behavior and Pursuing Profit: Offender Reintegration, Recidivism, and Puppy Mills

Abstract

Regulatory law is a form of regulation through the monetization of the sanction, a sanction that does not affect liberty. In its current application to the management of public order in countries affected by the financial crisis, the combination of high monetary sanctions with a speedy procedure supported by a wide margin of discretion has led to the phenomenon here called ‘bureaucratic repression’. It is the use, by different public order institutions, of the whole range of administrative sanctions available within the patchwork of laws, regulations and orders, but specially of the fine, with the aim of criminalizing, suppressing, penalizing and, ultimately, disabling any protest from social movements and citizens. In this context, a regulatory fine achieves much better than a penal fine the objective of concealing the repressive actions of the Authority, because in modern democracies increasing support has been lent to a discourse that tends to reduce the concept of repression to the area of the subsystems of penal and penitentiary control. This paper argues that this points to an unobtrusive and subtle shift towards practices more characteristic of a police state than of one purporting to be social and democratic.

Author

• Patricia Faraldo Cabana, University of A Corunna