As in other areas of social engineering, Sweden is considered as world-leading in creating systems that address social inequality. One of the cases in point is the Swedish day-fine system which has been considered as pioneering by systematically considering both the wealth of the offender and the seriousness of the offence when imposing the penalty. This chapter analyses in detail the Swedish day-fine system. The case study of Sweden sheds light on the pros and cons of day-fines by recalling the discussion in Sweden prior to introducing the system and the recent academic debates on extending the use of day-fines. The chapter also offers an account of the comprehensive prosecutorial guidelines as well as an analysis of the relevant case law, particularly in relation to adjustment of day-fines. The chapter argues that the Swedish day-fine system overall must be considered as a largely successful project which holds high esteem among courts and practitioners. The common view is that it is a merit of the system that it forces the courts to consider the economic circumstances of the accused and to articulate openly for the way in which such consideration has been done.

In 2007, a new Swiss Criminal Code became legally effective in which short prison sentences were to a large extent replaced by income-based day-fines. In addition, flat fines (fixed sums ranging from 1 to 10,000 Swiss francs) became more widely available as additional sanctions. Both fines and day-fines are to be converted into custody if they remain unpaid. Several thousand defendants are affected by such a conversion every year, but no systematic information has been collected on these cases. In order to fill this gap, the Department of Justice of the Canton of Zurich commissioned an evaluation on how often, under what circumstances and against what type of defendants monetary penalties are converted into custody. To this end, 447 case files were analyzed and a sample of 106 defendants serving a monetary sanction in prison were interviewed. Staff members and officials in charge of collecting monetary penalties were also interviewed. The results show that the most defendants serving monetary penalties in prison are confronted with multiple problems of integration. A second group were sentenced to substantial amounts of flat fines or day-fines that they or their networks were unable to pay.