To answer the OP: People have a tendency to draw lines directly between Point A and Point Z if it suits them, even if it’s truly a case of Point A to B and then from B to C, and then eventually from Y to Z.
Or the saying: “To someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” So if someone is convinced that society lacks compassion, they will readily believe the idea that someone went to jail for speeding tickets even when that isn’t truly the case.
She died for speeding tickets and failure to pay them. She committed no other acts that led to her death.
Not having paid the tickets is not a mitigating circumstance that makes the death okay, so some will leave it out.
The only way I would correct her is to say that she died for unpaid speeding tickets. It’s no less outrageous.
Read ALL of the posts. Context. Apply some.
…I’ve read all of the posts. I replied to a specific post, which was in response to a post that I made, that I quoted in full, and didn’t remove any context. I don’t give a fuck if bump has said “several times that the prison staff were at fault.” One can both think that “the prison staff were at fault” and be “casually dismissing the tragic circumstances of somebody’s death” at the same time.
And when somebody states that “It’s not just this one case; it’s an attitude I keep running across- this one just happened to be more annoying than most, since there aren’t the mitigating circumstances of poverty” I’m entirely happy to characterize that post as casually dismissing the tragic circumstances of somebody’s death. Because it is. Because if Coltrain were poor it would have mitigated the annoyance.
I think it just makes a snappier clickbait headline to say something like “British mum in jail after ONE drink on plane” than “British mum in jail after getting in a heated argument with airport security”.
Probably the same phenomenon that caused all except one of the replies not to address the question.
So you’re saying “she died for” is a legitimate synonym for “she committed no other acts that led to her death”?
By that standard, if a woman is hit and killed by a drunk driver on her way to the grocery store, can we say she died for groceries?
That, and being addicted to drugs. Rather few people die from withdrawal from not paying speeding tickets.
It’s terrible that she died. But there is a great deal more to it than ‘let’s just not arrest people who ignore their court dates’.
Regards,
Shodan
Sure, because the analogy here is to what killed a person, which is the drunk driver, so the OP could be analogized into your analogy as “Well, of course the drunk driver was at fault, as I said several times, but if she hadn’t been getting groceries, then this wouldn’t have been a problem.”
The analogy breaks down at that level, because “getting groceries” is not immoral nor illegal. Speeding, ignoring your court date, and abusing drugs, is both. So that factor affects it.
Regards,
Shodan
I was pointing out how that was a poor analogy, thank you for agreeing.
Now, I do have to admit that I do find it interesting that you consider minor traffic infractions to be immoral.
You also have not answered the question I posed earlier. You said that a punishment is supposed to hurt. For the well off, a $200 fine for speeding doesn’t hurt. For someone much less well off, a $200 fine could hurt very badly. By your logic, the poor person is punished, and the well off person is not, even though they broke the same exact law.
So, is it your contention that it is only immoral to speed if you are poor?
No, that doesn’t follow logically. Punishment is supposed to be based on the severity of the offense, but it doesn’t work the other way. If you get away with something so that you are not punished at all, that doesn’t mean what you did wasn’t immoral.
The law operates on everyone the same, or at least it is supposed to. You could make a case that fines should be greater for rich people than for poor, but we haven’t done that yet. The fines are what legislators think is sufficient to deter a given infraction for the average person. There are some limited options to reduce the impact of fines on a poor person, like payment plans so they don’t have to come up with the money all at once, or community service instead of fines.
Plus notice what was happening in the case of the woman who died from withdrawal. It wasn’t a matter of her being poor, or a ticket that she couldn’t pay. She had multiple tickets, which she ignored, and court dates, that she ignored. Multiple tickets is worse than one, therefore the fines are higher because they accumulate. Ignoring your court dates is worse, which is why the warrant was issued, which is why she was taken into custody, which is why she detoxed, which is why she died.
The question is, what do we do about people like that? If you don’t pay your fines, and you blow off your court dates, and you continue to speed, should the consequences be different if you are rich vs. if you are poor? It sucks that she died, but how do we address the connection between her death and the fact that fines weren’t working in her case?
Regards,
Shodan
For anyone who wants a perfect example of what I was asking about in the OP, BigT’s post quoted above is a perfect example.
The FACT is that she was in jail for not complying with the law about outstanding tickets, not for the tickets themselves. Traffic tickets typically carry a fine as a penalty. Not paying them or not showing up to court can get a warrant created to detain you and bring you to court. Even then, it’s not “jail” in the sense of a sentence, but rather they’re going to keep you in custody with the intent to compel you to show up to court.
She died because she had incompetent jailers who did not recognize her distress or symptoms and did not render her any aid. That’s why she died. The drug addiction is a red herring here- had she had any other medical condition where a crisis could kill her, and that happened in custody, and they didn’t help her, it would have been equally incompetent and wrong. The addictioan could have made them less sympathetic, but that’s more of an indicator of incompetence than a mitigating factor.
Neither of those things are “for parking tickets”. That’s a very disingenuous statement- it implies that she was taken to jail for speeding and executed or something. Which is not what happened at all. Why is that so hard to understand? Is it that it doesn’t fit into a specific political narrative that seeks to bash the police and justice system, so they’re “simplifying” it so that it does? Is it really a lack of comprehension of what happened? Is it something else?
I was only replying to your assertion that punishment should hurt. If you are now saying that punishment does not need to hurt, that it is based on severity of the offense, then that is different from what you said earlier.
So, the well off, to which a speeding ticket does not hurt, do not want to avoid the punishment enough to avoid the behavior, as it does not lead to punishment, while there are those who this punishment could quite literally ruin their lives.
The OP made a specific claim of a specific person in a specific article, that didn’t have the “mitigating” factors of begin poor, so in this particular cherry picked instance, money and lack of ability to pay was not the problem.
The vast majority of the time, the money is the problem. You have to pay $200 fine, you don’t have $200. It’s not that you would need to sacrifice and not drink a latte every day for a month to save it up, it’s not even that you’d have to dig deep, and start skipping lunch. It is simply money that you do not have. Then that becomes greater when you get penalties for not being able to pay it.
I suppose they could go to a check’n’go place, and become beholden to them for the rest of their lives.
Drug addiction is a very real health problem, and one thing that does not do anything to address or to help mental health problems is punishing people for them. Yes, in the ADHD thread, there is the claim that enough spanking will prevent ADHD. I suppose the same argument could be made that drug addiction can be cured if the punishment for it is severe enough, but I would doubt that as well.
So, we either actually work on treating the problem, or we keep punishing people for their health problems until they (the people, not the problems) go away.
It is not a lack of comprehension on the part of those who see the tickets as the first step involving her in a legal situation she was not competent to get herself out of. That she was not competent to get herself out of the legal situation she found herself in due to minor infractions is an indictment on our legal system, as well as our educational system.
You do not need to ascribe false motives to those who are capable of following the narrative from the point where she was initially put into contact with the legal system, to where she ended up dying at the hands of the legal system.
Yes, the very worst thing that she did to attract the ire of the law was traffic infractions. That that lead to her demise should b a wake up call to us all, even a “there for the grace of god go I” moment for many of us.
To instead consider it an annoyance to you that you hear people complain that our legal system has these results of people’s lives being ruined or ended over completely non-violent minor offenses is what I have difficulty understanding.
No, I am not saying anything different. Punishment needs to hurt, it is based on the severity of the offense, and the severity is based on the legislators’ understanding of how much it hurts for the average person.
That’s the question under discussion - what can or should be done about people who ignore their fines and blow off their court dates up to the point where it can ruin their lives?
Yes. The question being, what do we do about people who make things that much worse for themselves?
Someone doesn’t have $200 for a speeding ticket. So they blow it off, and continue to speed. Now they have multiple speeding tickets, fines for ignoring the court date, and warrants out for their arrest. Then, rarely, they get arrested and die as an indirect result.
What do we do about that? If we reduce the fines to something they can easily pay, they have no incentive to stop speeding. And IME people who don’t treat a $200 ticket seriously don’t treat a $20 ticket any more seriously. Do we escalate the process to the point where it rises back to $200, which they can’t pay, so they blow it off, and then get arrested? Do we just say “NM the rules don’t apply to you because you can’t pay for your fines or your insurance”?
Regards,
Shodan
You clearly don’t get it… it’s not the traffic tickets that ruined her life. Full stop. Just about everyone who drives eventually gets traffic tickets. 99.99999% of those people simply pay them or contest them in court. Some tiny fraction of people, for whatever reason, refuse to do either. Which is effectively telling the court, and by extension the government that you don’t care to comply by their rules, just like if you skipped bail.
So they issue what’s called a bench warrant, meaning that it’s a warrant for your arrest issued by a judge with the express purpose to detain you and make you show up for court, which is what you were expected to do in the first place when you got the ticket. You don’t end up in this situation at random- you have to basically repeatedly be irresponsible or willfully disregard the tickets/court to end up in that situation. How else should the court get you to show up? They’ve already asked nicely and even given you an option to just pay up. At this point, this is pretty much their only option- I’m not sure how a court system is supposed to work if the players just don’t show up.
Then once they’ve jailed you, your jailers have a certain duty of care toward you because you can’t you know, go to the hospital when you feel like it or get food whenever you want, so they have to provide those things for you. THAT is where the jailers failed in Coltrain’s case.
I cherry picked this case for the reason that she was white and not poor, yet people are still making the illogical leap I was talking about- it is a better example without the factors of income and race involved.
Okay, so what you are saying is that the well off can break laws with impunity, because the punishment doesn’t hurt them, and the less fortunate are punished disproportionately more than the average.
those are two entirely different questions. The first is something we can address with our courts and legal system, to see if we are setting realistic expectations. Did you really blow off court if taking the day off means you lose your job? Did you really refuse to pay the fine if paying it means you lose your home?
The second question is for sociologists and social workers. What do we do with people who are not capable of taking care of these tasks on their own? Do we help them out, or do we punish them further?
Or they don’t continue to speed. They get the one ticket, for going 4 mph over the limit, and they cannot afford to pay it. That then snowballs into further fines and court costs. They couldn’t pay the $200, now they are looking at thousands.
They don’t need to die in jail in order to have their lives ruined.
I personally am in favor of means tested fees and fines. Your experience may be that someone who can’t pay a $200 fine also can’t pay a $20 fine, but your experience is extremely limited. There are other options to be explored as well.
As long as the only tool in your tool chest to deal with people with social problems is punishment, you will always be confused on how to best apply that punishment to get people to be able to follow the rules.
This doesn’t really answer the question. What should be done with people who blow off their court date or don’t pay their fines?