Health Literacy of Oncologic Patients and Their Informal Caregivers

The haemato-oncological patient requires care due to the impact of the disease itself as well as the hard treatment. Health professionals and informal caregivers also play a central role in this multipart and demanding process of caring and management of the disease. Communication and health literacy to the patients and respective caregivers are crucial in promoting safe care. The development of quality improvement projects by health organizations has contributed to increase health literacy among its participants. Its implementation contributes to a closer relationship between health professionals, patients, and informal caregivers with a consequent improvement in the response to their needs.

What’s Really Wrong with Fining Crimes? On the Hard Treatment of Criminal Monetary Fines

Among the advocates of expressive theories of punishment, there is a strong consensus that monetary fines cannot convey the message of censure that is required to punish serious crimes or crimes against the person (e.g., rape). Money is considered an inappropriate symbol to express condemnation. In this article, I argue that this sentiment is correct, although not for the reasons suggested by advocates of expressivism. The monetary day-fine should not be understood as a simple deprivation of money, but as a punishment that reduces the offender’s capacity to consume for a certain period of time. Conceived in this manner, I argue that it is perfectly suitable to convey censure. However, the practical impossibility of ensuring that the person who pays the fine is the same person who has been convicted of the offense seriously undermines the acceptability of the monetary fine as an instrument of censure. Minimizing the risk of the fine’s hard treatment being transferred to third parties is a necessary condition for the monetary fine to be considered a viable alternative to lengthy prison sentences.

Day Fines

The day fine concept consists in imposing fines in such a structured way that the final amount of the fine is directly proportionate to offenders’ means and to the offense’s seriousness. This is achieved by multiplication of two quantities: the amount of one day fine and the number of day fines. The amount of one day fine is set in proportion to offenders’ means, while the number of day fines reflects the offense’s seriousness. In some—especially Anglophone—countries the day fine is called either a structured fine, as there is a clear structure of how the fine is calculated, or a unit fine, as offenders’ means serve as a basis for calculating one day fine unit. The systematic way of assessing offenders’ means is what differentiates day fines from fixed fines: by setting only the final amount, fixed fines might be proportional to offenders’ means, yet such a relationship is unclear, unverifiable, and likely inconsistent across sentencers. There are several rationales for making explicit the relationship between offenders’ means and a fine. Consequentionalists (utilitarians) support day fines because they are supposed to similarly deter offenders of different wealth. Those less concerned with utilitarian theories support day fines because they better communicate the appropriate amount of censure via hard treatment to offenders than fixed fines. Day fines further limit their unequal impact on disadvantaged groups upon default: if a fine is set in proportion to offenders’ means, the ratio of poor offenders defaulting and serving a prison sentence is likely to decrease when compared with not setting a fine in direct proportion to offenders’ means. Sentencing scholarship would prefer day fines over fixed fines as they are an expression of principled sentencing and they likely limit disparities in assessing offenders’ means. Day fines are used especially in Continental Europe and in Latin America. Even though the Anglophone world often strove to introduce day fines, and sometimes succeeded, the day fine concept was never widely accepted in the common-law systems. The large amount of scholarship published in English thus retells Continental experiences; suggests ways of implementing day fines, especially in the United States, where they are neglected compared with Continental Europe; or discusses the pilot projects in Anglophone countries. Readers should be warned, however, that there is still little research on how day fines function in practice, and even on fines in general, even though they the most popular sanction.

Sentencing multiple conviction offenders

Sentenced offenders who re-offend prior to serving their previously imposed sentence (multiple conviction offenders) are situated between multiple and repeat offenders. This article examines how they should be sentenced based on censure, consequentialist and desert theories. I conclude that these aims cannot be achieved if they are treated as repeat offenders, and neither can the requirement of proportionality. Censure is, similarly, communicated primarily via hard treatment not via sentence pronouncement. I further analyse all continental European penal codes; half of them do not have any provision governing the sentencing of multiple conviction offenders (tacitly treating them as repeat offenders) and only two countries provide detailed sentencing guidance. I conclude by offering recommendations for the principled sentencing of multiple conviction offenders.

The Conventional Problem with Corporate Sentencing (and One Unconventional Solution)

A recent wave of expressive accounts of corporate criminal law operate on the promise that corporate punishment can express a unique form of condemnation not capturable through civil enforcement. Unfortunately, the realities of corporate sentencing have thus far failed to make good on this expressive promise. Viewed in light of existing conventions that imbue meaning into our practices of punishment, corporate sentences rarely impose hard treatment in a manner or degree that these conventions seem to require. Accordingly, standard corporate sanctions turn out to be ill-suited to deliver—and, often, will likely undermine—the stigmatic punch upon which expressive defenses of corporate criminal law depend. A common response to this conventional problem with corporate sentencing has been to propose more, and harsher, corporate punishments. However, this approach overlooks the extent to which corporate punishment derives its stigmatic force from preexisting norms and conventions concerning individual punishment. If trying to improve corporate punishment, then, expressivists might instead seek either to leverage or to dismantle the underlying conventions that give existing sanctions meaning. An example of the former strategy would be to revitalize long-neglected proposals for corporate shaming by adopting a criminal convention currently absent from the corporate space—namely, the pervasive, stigmatic application of epithets like “thief” or “felon.” An example of the latter would be to join criminal justice reformers in targeting conventions that, in recent decades, have enabled increasingly draconian sentencing practices. On this view, dissolving corporate sentencing’s conventional problem may represent a further, incidental benefit of systemic criminal justice reform.

Mercy Triumphs over Judgement: Intrusive or Enabling Mercy?

This chapter engages in a philosophical and theological critique of thinkers who construe justice and mercy as contradictory norms. It develops a theological account of restorative justice in which mercy is understood as the ‘operative condition’ enabling the pursuit of justice beyond mere retribution. It elaborates this through an account of the moral anthropology inherent in Christian accounts of penance which understand moral agency as a time-bound pursuit of character-formation. Justice is pursued not in meting out a measure of proportionate hard-treatment, but in the merciful gift of the ‘penitential time’ which may enable reform of character and action. It ends with a tentative account of sanctification, desire and desistence and suggests these aspects of theological anthropology might inform a critique of the criminogenic machine of consumerism.

‘The Soul is the Prison of the Body’

The promise of neurobiological interventions that afford improving pro-social behavior is particularly interesting for criminal justice systems. After all, rehabilitation of offenders is one of their central objectives. This raises the question of whether states can deploy such means to rehabilitate offenders against the latters’ will, as part of—or instead of—punishment. Some advocates of compulsory treatments of offenders consider them more humane (and effective) than current forms of hard treatment such as incarceration. This chapter critically engages with suggestions to treat legally competent offenders for rehabilitative purposes against their will by emphasizing two aspects. First, strong human rights of offenders—summarily the right to mental self-determination—oppose mandatory interventions into criminogenic psychological states or processes. These human rights are not (yet) recognized in every jurisdiction, but emerge from general liberal and democratic principles that most western jurisdictions endorse. Secondly, the case for mandatory rehabilitation is weaker than it may appear at first glance, because it is anything but clear that and why the penological aim of rehabilitation justifies severe interferences of offenders’ rights. In any case, it seems that states could attain their legitimate forward-looking aims—preventing recidivism—by less restrictive means such as incapacitation. Thus, compulsory rehabilitation may only be justified in exceptional cases. Rather, offenders should be offered a choice between neurorehabilitation and detention.