828
Opinion of the Court
plainant. But if it is for criminal contempt the sentence is punitive, to vindicate the authority of the court." Ibid.
As Gompers recognized, however, the stated purposes of a contempt sanction alone cannot be determinative. Id., at 443. "[W]hen a court imposes fines and punishments on a contemnor, it is not only vindicating its legal authority to enter the initial court order, but it also is seeking to give effect to the law's purpose of modifying the contemnor's behavior to conform to the terms required in the order." Hicks, 485 U. S., at 635. Most contempt sanctions, like most criminal punishments, to some extent punish a prior offense as well as coerce an offender's future obedience. The Hicks Court accordingly held that conclusions about the civil or criminal nature of a contempt sanction are properly drawn, not from "the subjective intent of a State's laws and its courts," ibid., but "from an examination of the character of the relief itself," id., at 636.
The paradigmatic coercive, civil contempt sanction, as set forth in Gompers, involves confining a contemnor indefinitely until he complies with an affirmative command such as an order "to pay alimony, or to surrender property ordered to be turned over to a receiver, or to make a conveyance." 221 U. S., at 442; see also McCrone v. United States, 307 U. S. 61, 64 (1939) (failure to testify). Imprisonment for a fixed term similarly is coercive when the contemnor is given the option of earlier release if he complies. Shillitani v. United States, 384 U. S. 364, 370, n. 6 (1966) (upholding as civil "a determinate [2-year] sentence which includes a purge clause"). In these circumstances, the contemnor is able to purge the contempt and obtain his release by committing an affirmative act, and thus " 'carries the keys of his prison in his own pocket.' " Gompers, 221 U. S., at 442, quoting In re Nevitt, 117 F. 448, 451 (CA8 1902).
By contrast, a fixed sentence of imprisonment is punitive and criminal if it is imposed retrospectively for a "completed act of disobedience," Gompers, 221 U. S., at 443, such that
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