I agree that the systrm, as is, unjustly penalizes the poor for being poor and protects the well-off - is it coincidental that those who design and manage the system are in the group that benefits from this disparity?
But, to play devil’s advocate, consider this:
Person A has an income of $10,000 a year, hasn’t seen a doctor in a dozen years, eats once every day or two and lives in a roach infested shithole.
Person B has an income of $10,000,000 a year and has all of the luxuries etc that that figure suggests.
They both commit a murder. The victim, method and motive are so improbably similar as to be nigh-on exact. They both get a 100 year sentence.
Would you say that incarceration hurts them both equally?
No, the reasoning is so that they are able to press criminal charges against people if they are not able to pay the fine.
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Which is just the flip side of what I’m saying, which is that civil penalties don’t work because they basically require the government to sue someone in civil court to recover those tickets and any penalties. If someone doesn’t have any assets to sue for, then the option is to garnish wages, which people around here would scream bloody murder about if the garnishee happened to be poor.
[quote=“k9bfriender, post:149, topic:820737”]
Bitch and moan, eh? That’s what it is called when you question the results of a failed public policy? Nice.
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Calling the concept of specific fines for specific infractions is basically calling over 1000 years of legal precedent a ‘failed policy’. That’s hyperbolic to an absurd extreme.
The point is that
It was born of frustration, but around here (SDMB) there seems to be a mentality that the government can’t do ANYTHING that might make the plight of the poor worse, regardless of whatever irresponsibility they may perpetrate or inability to adhere to the laws of the land. For example, one thing they require in my state in order to drive is proof of financial responsibility, i.e. liability insurance. We also require emissions inspections and potential repairs if a car doesn’t pass. I’ve heard people get bent out of shape about how both of those things are onerous to the poor.
Which I don’t get- nobody OWES them the ability to drive; that’s a privilege and a responsibility, not some kind of human right. And it requires a certain financial capacity, up to and including the ability to pay a traffic ticket if you get caught doing something you’re not supposed to. Or you know, having a valid license or registration. If you can scrape together enough to buy an inexpensive car, that also obligates you to register it, be licensed to drive it, and maintain it in a way that adheres to the law. And if you can’t handle that financially, you shouldn’t be driving, full stop. It’s absurd to then cry foul because you can’t handle the ticket for not having done those things that the law requires.
Beyond that, I’m not so sure that proportional fines are the answer either; first, it’s none of any pissant town in the middle of nowhere’s business what my income is if I’m just driving through, and that doesn’t need to become public record either just because I got a ticket.
Second, the concept here is that each crime or infraction has a specific severity and associated fine. I’m not sure why some things, like say, a traffic ticket should be tied to one’s income, while building a fence in your backyard that doesn’t adhere to the building standards is fine to be a fixed fine? It’s a little absurd to tie everything to someone’s income level- maybe allow for people to apply for a fine adjustment due to circumstances or something like that, but not scale the ticket upward with income.
I mean, there’s no reason Ross Perot or Mark Cuban ought to pay $50,000 (which is probably low) for some penny-ante traffic ticket that would cost me $200. None of us would be put out by paying either amount, but it’s also ridiculous for someone to conceivably pay more than the worth of their car for a trivial speeding ticket.
Money should be out of criminal penalties entirely. Raise taxes to cover it. The police or city getting funding out of people breaking the law creates a perverse incentive w.r.t. the value of fines, enforcement, and even what should be a crime.
If we have to go with fines, then it’s the state’s responsibility to make sure everyone is stabily and consistently fed, clothed, housed, and healthy (both mentally and physically), and have the tools or resources they need to stay that way. It should be an active feat to be homeless, starving, or unable to pursue your best life. If we’re in that position, then yeah, maybe we can talk about taking away money since it merely penalized people and takes away purely optional resources.
Is it not ridiculous for someone to have their freedom taken away over a trivial speeding ticket, OR the fact they didn’t write a $200 check?
I guess I’d ask, what is the purpose of the ticket, anyway? If it’s to discourage bad behavior, then it kind of needs to have teeth, even for the wealthy, unless we don’t think they need to be discouraged from committing misdemeanors. If that is the purpose, is there a reason to have poor people far more incentivized to be lawful than the wealthy? I’d like to understand why that’s the case, if we believe that.
If the purpose is something else, let’s stop pretending that it’s to encourage lawful behavior, and admit exactly what you want traffic tickets to do.
Well, when a fine, upstanding wealthy, especially uber wealthy and influential citizen happens to accidentally bribe, cheat, and steal their way into more wealth, nobody but millions of Americans suffer a financial crisis, lose their homes, their jobs, or suffer massive cuts to welfare and soon social security and medicare, sure, but when one of those filthy poor people are unlawful… they’re stinky, they hurt one or two other poor people and I have to hear about it on the news. The nerve of it! Of course we need to keep those bastards in line, just who do you think the boot in jackboot is meant for???
The criminal charges are NOT because they fail to pay a fine. The criminal charges are for not showing up to your court date. (Or you can pay the fine beforehand)
And there are already means and methods in place for those so impoverished that they cant pay a fine. It gets reduced, or they are given other options.
Longer time to pay, or community service options.
Here’s the thing- the fines are in place for the same reason any fine is in place- as a financial penalty that’s supposed to be commensurate with the gravity of the offense. But here’s the rub- ALL of them work the same; the courts get pissy if you don’t pay your fines if it’s a criminal offense.
We seem to be hung up on traffic tickets, but let’s use a hypothetical here. My city (Dallas) has a $129.10 fine for failing to put your child in an appropriate safety seat in your car. It’s a misdemeanor, just like running a red light or speeding. It’s also non-violent. But it potentially affects an innocent child. Car seats are expensive though.
Should we scrap car seat laws because some people can’t afford them? Seems to me that these are laws that absolutely should be enforced vigorously. Same with school zones, which BTW are $500 tickets. Same thing- sucks to be unable to afford that ticket, but that’s not the problem of the kids you might hit.
And that’s the thing- in some sense the car seat laws are worse, in that they require someone to buy something, or pay a fine AND have to buy it anyway, which I’m sure is tough for the poor. But they can get one free through many public or private programs to provide them to people who can’t afford them.
So what’s the excuse if they get ticketed for not having a car seat? Should we give half a shit if it’s a hardship at that point? The point isn’t deterrence, it’s compliance.
I’m skipping the bit about car seat laws, because those (and school zones) are about the safety of children, and nobody is arguing that laws to protect children should be scrapped.
On to the other bits.
Financial penalty commensurate with the gravity of the offense. It is apparent to me that a $200 fine has a greater impact on the life of a poor person than a wealthy person. Is the gravity of the offense greater for the poor person? Why should the wealthy be impacted so much less when the offense is the same?
Manson72 suggested that poor people should be extra diligent in complying with the law if they can’t afford the fine. The converse is that wealthy people needn’t be as diligent in complying with the law, because they CAN easily afford the fine. If the point is compliance, a fixed fine seems to fail here.
In theory having a income-based fine system sounds reasonable. But in practice, it would be a nightmare.
First, you’d STILL have the requirement that someone gather up the requisite documents (W-2, tax receipt, pay stub, etc…) and mail them in to whatever rinky-dink county sheriff or town had pulled you over.
Then you’d have the situation where you’d have to have the same exact non-compliance warrants and penalties for failing to send in your evidence of income. I don’t know about you, but I don’t really trust say… the Dawson County, TX IT department to have their shit together in terms of protecting my financial information.
Another likely situation is where you’d likely have each town/county having a different schedule- some would likely keep it flat for convenience anyway, some would stick it to the wealthy, others would try and make it progressive, etc…
Then there has to be some kind of auditing procedure to make sure people don’t habitually under-report their income to get a better deal on tickets. This would be in EVERY county and city and state that did this.
In short, you’d be introducing a massive amount of overhead, risk and BS for some tiny number of people who run afoul of a pretty specific situation, AND don’t avail themselves of the multiple methods to alleviate it.
There is a significant difference between people working, and people being fined. But in any case, lets explore you r analogy a bit.
There are only a few ways to get me to fire you. Violence is definitely a quick way. IF you commit violence against another employee, a client, or a dog, you are done. This is protecting the safety of the workplace. It doesn’t matter what the effects are, or how “fair” fair they are, the number one priority is to have safe workplace.
Harassment and intimidation will get you terminated nearly as fast. You may get a warning about the behavior depending on how disruptive it is, or you may be immediately terminated. Once again, this is to protect the safety of the workplace.
These are analogous to violent or threatening behavior in public. People need to be prevented from posing a danger to the public.
The more analogous to traffic tickets behavior in the workplace is poor performance or attendance issues. These are things that I want to work with my employees to improve. If someone isn’t very good at their job, then I find a way to make them better at it, or find a job that they can do well at. My goal is not to punish people for not being good at their job, but to get them to be good at their job.
As far as attendance, I need people to be here when I schedule them. That is why I have a very generous point system, along with a very fair probation system, that makes it so that the employee essentially has to fire themself by just not showing up.
Also, I avoid hiring wealthy individuals, and do my best to hire the poor. Part of this is to be more of a positive impact in my community, as I move people off of benefits and into good paying jobs, and part of this is specifically as you said, the rich person doesn’t care, so they cannot be compelled to show up and perform nearly as well as the person who actually needs the job.
The post that you responded to had the word “reasonable” in it, right after talking about making sure that a fine was something that was actually affordable to the finee.
And, your last complaint shows that you are still having difficulties in separating the protecting public safety and your need to see people punished aspects of the justice system.
I don’t need to drive there. I drive in Cincinnati, which has horrendous traffic and drivers as well. I was just trying to relate to something that I thought you would be familiar with.
This isn’t exactly current, but I doubt the number have changed much
That doesn’t sound like “in check” to me.
I think I straightened out these quotes…
Right, but that is my whole point. The paying of tickets and fines should not be the primary motivation here. If someone doesn’t have any assets to sue for, then what is the point of giving them tickets and fines that they cannot pay in the first place? It’s not screaming bloody murder, that’s just your desire to wrongfully project motivations and emotional states onto your interlocutors, it is pointing out that the policy is not having the intended effect, and is harming people in the process. That is a very rational standpoint. You can make the argument that the policy is having the intended effect, or you can make the argument that the policy is not harming people. I would disagree with those arguments, but I would not call it “screaming bloody murder” in an effort to ad hominem my opponent.
Slavery was an institution that stretches back for thousands of years. Debtor’s prisons have existed in one form or another for pretty much ever.
Yeah, we get better, we look at policies that do not move society forward, and instead move it back, and we call them failed, regardless of how traditional they are.
The idea that a policy cannot be a failed policy because it is over 1000 years old is naive in to an absurd extreme.
You look at a policy, and see if it serves its purpose. If it does not, it is failed. Defend how arbitrary fines for minor traffic infractions serves to protect the public, don’t rely solely on tradition for your argument.
That may seem that way to you, but I have no idea why you would think that sort of thing. Now, there is certainly something to be said for the government and society should be working to improve the consideration of the people living here, rather than to harm its citizens, and if that is the thing that you seem to be seeing, then I would agree.
But your characterization is a strawman that is hyperbolic to the extreme.
A few other things. You think that carrying state minimum insurance makes you financially responsible? Do you know how much your state minimum covers? It’s fine for fender benders where maybe someone gets some stitches, but if we are talking about totaled cars and hospital stays, your minimum liability insurance isn’t going to even scratch the surface.
And that you have “heard people get bent out of shape” does not have anything even remotely resembling relevance to this thread or this discussion. If you want to talk to people who get bent out of shape, go talk to them. If you want to characterize anything I say as “being bent out of shape”, then you need to actually point out what it was that I said, and make the case, not just make a “seems to” argument, as that is worse than useless, that is only making an argument about your perceptions and analysis, not about what anyone has actually one or said.
I do believe that society does owe people the right to move about. Society owes people the ability to get a job. Society has set things up so that you really need transportation in order to function, and has not provided that transportation.
Make up a robust public transportation system, along with Uber vouchers and hopefully self driving cars, and then you can call driving a luxury.
As long as driving is the only way to get to and from a job, it’s not a luxury, it is a necessity to living in society, and society should not take away necessities without a very compelling reason.
So, sure, make your case for improving public transportation. I have no idea where you stand on it, so I will not ascribe to you any position, but I will point out that the majority of people who are for harsh punishments to the poor are also people who are against funding public transportation.
If your point is that we should be concentrating on ensuring the people do not need to have a car in order to survive, then I will agree. If you are for perpetuating the system we have now, while also claiming that driving is a luxury, then I would have to disagree entirely.
If you find it to be a hardship to give a pissant town your financial information, then just don’t speed through it.
You have no right to drive through a pissant town, that’s a privilege and a responsibility, not some kind of human right. And it requires a certain responsibility, up to and including the ability to demonstrate your finances if you get caught doing something you’re not supposed to.
So, you are saying that you encourage a system where wealthy people are able to break laws with impunity?
Then it does not act as a deterrence to you, or to mark cuban, just to people who are not as well off as you.
Considering that I know people with cars that are worth less than $200, that statement makes your argument completely fall apart.
As I was responding to someone who was only talking about fines, correcting me that it is not just about fines is entirely missing the point and the conversation.
In any case, the criminal charges are because they did not follow the arbitrary stipulations laid out by the court. One of which is the ability to take off a weekday to attend court, something that not all employers will let you do.
If you are in a position to go to court, you have a decent chance of eliminating or at least reducing the penalty. If you don’t have the means to attend court, you have to pay the full fine ahead of time.
If you do not have the money to pay the fine, and cannot take time off work in order to contest the fine or have it reduced, what exactly are the options that you are advocating here?
But how does that make sense, if the severity of the fine decreases with the wealth of the individual, does that mean that the gravity of the offense also decreases with the wealth of the individual?
Does fining someone $129.10 help them to get a car seat?
If I were in charge of that policy, I would fine them the cost of a car seat, then give them a car seat.
Did anyone at all say anything at all about scrapping any laws at all?
If so, please cite.
If not, then you are tilting at strawmen, again.
I have no idea how robust your programs are. Can I show up at any time, on any day, and get myself a free car seat?
Or, do I have to show up at specific places and times (with my car, of course, that I have no right, only a privilege to drive), fill out a bunch of paperwork, including the same sort of financial information that you would complain about having to provide to a pissant town because you refused to follow their speed limits, and then usually wait until that is approved, then go back, and when they happen to have one, maybe you get in line to get it?
Yeah, getting people to comply is all great and all. But wouldn’t it make more sense to actually tailor your laws to get people to comply with things that they are able to comply with, rather than simply punish people for not being able to comply, and making it harder for them to do so in the future?
Like I said, it is a failed public policy if it has these sorts of negative results. No matter how long a tradition we have of enjoying seeing people suffer for their sins, if it doesn’t actually improve society, it is failed.
or a copy of your federal returns.
They also have tax payers that pay into their rinky dink town. Do you feel that they are not able to protect their own taxpayer information? I have to send my fed returns into my city when I file my city income tax.
Very interesting, that way, there would be many different things that people try, and see what works best. That is often times better than continuing to do the thing that you know that doesn’t work. You just pointed out a feature, not a bug.
In any case, it is not that hard to have such things set at the state level, if you are that concerned about it.
If you habitually under-report your income on your 1040, then it is not every county and state, it is not some rinky dink town, that is going to audit you, it is the IRS.
Nah, there wouldn’t be any real overhead, nor risk, and the poor are already used to dealing with lots of BS. Is it that you are worried that the wealthy will suddenly have to actually face a punishment that actually acts as a deterrence?
I think there’s a fundamental difference of opinion here; some of us think that it’s more important to enforce the laws of the land than it is than those laws be entirely, absolutely fair, and others seem to think that it’s more important that those laws be absolutely, completely fair than it is that they’re enforced.
By that I mean that you guys (the progressives/left-wing types) have basically ruled out anything but an income-based fine system because you feel anything else is unfair.
I don’t think that’s reasonable; at some point you have to expect people to take responsibility and pay or show up to court, or for community service or whatever; you can’t just say that fines are bad- people can’t pay them, and then rule out every other option because they may require some tiny percentage of the population to be inconvenienced. You can’t say something has “failed”, just because it isn’t absolutely, completely 100% fair- on the main, fines DO work for the vast majority of people- I’d guess that the vast, vast majority of traffic tickets are just paid or contested in court with little fanfare, and that remaining small percentage runs afoul of some problem with payment.
Worrying whether it’s a bigger pain in the ass for one person or another is immaterial, provided both can afford it. It’s really only an issue if someone can’t afford to pay it- I agree there should be payment plans, or some other sort of relief (community service perhaps?) for those people.
But I don’t think it’s so important that everything be super-fair to the point of changing a system that has overwhelmingly worked for thousands of years. Tweak it where it needs tweaking (work with those who just flat-out can’t afford their tickets), and leave it alone, rather than coming in and changing things wholesale just because of a tiny, tiny minority that have this issue. That’s just burning money that cities, counties and states just don’t have for a change that benefits a tiny number of people, and will probably make it worse for everyone else. That’s a poor choice if you ask me.
I don’t have a problem with enforcement, I think the laws should be changed so that enforcement doesn’t punish some people more than others* for the same offense. The difference of opinion is that you think it’s fine for punishments to vary widely in their impact on offenders.
What does “work” mean in this context? Fines work because most people pay them? If the purpose of the ticket is extracting money from people who get caught speeding, then yeah, they work great.
My view is that the money is the means to an end, not the core purpose of traffic enforcement. Can you get the same end with a different means?
*Let’s say you and me both have a child, both kids have an xBox, and both kids did the same something that was wrong. We decide to punish the kids equally, by taking away the xBox for one week. However, my kid hasn’t played on the xBox for a month, and yours plays it every day in an online group with all his friends. Your kid is going to be way more miserable than my kid. Did we, as parents, punish them equally?
They punish the same- the difference is in the ability to sustain the punishment. But absent some sort of complicated system that would take into account all sorts of confounding variables, you can’t really have a “fair” fine-based system. I mean, how do you tell the difference between a family of four making $80k with a high mortgage and a family of four making $80k with a low mortgage. Or between all the other vagaries of personal finance- what if someone is just flat out stupid and doesn’t know how to budget/save/etc… and in theory should have enough money, but doesn’t? Or credulous elderly people gulled by televangelists? There are plenty of legitimate ways that fines could disproportionately impact people outside of a single metric like income.
That’s why, I suspect they set the fines where they are- the vast majority of people can sustain a $200 traffic ticket- it’s a pain in the ass for almost everyone- enough to be a deterrent, but not enough to actually impact them.
What else are you going to do? The only two options we have are to fine people, or to incarcerate them/compel them to do something like community service, and they already decided that small misdemeanors like traffic tickets aren’t worth incarceration, so we have fines.
Don’t get me wrong- I’m totally against the idea of tickets being a major revenue generator for towns/cities and counties or law enforcement itself. It sets up a perverse incentive for police to be extra sticky about stuff like traffic tickets, and leads to abuses.
But I’m not sure what else you do, and I’m not convinced that setting up income based fines is really much more equitable, while being sure that it would be a huge cost and a lot of overhead above and beyond what already cash-strapped governments already have.
There may be a fundamental difference, but it is not as you state. I have no problem with enforcing laws, I just want to make sure that those laws are wisely crafted to promote the public policy that they are intended to promote.
I could say that “some of us feel it is important for laws to be crafted to promote policy, and others of are more concerned about keeping the status quo than about ensuring that the laws lead to productive outcomes”, but that would be a rather passive aggressive and insulting way of summing up someone else’s opinion.
Some of us wouldn’t do that.
Not really, I mean, look at the thread. We’ve suggested community service, we’ve suggested car impoundment, we’ve suggested that if you pay a fine for not having a car seat, that that fine should go towards the purchase of a car seat.
You guys (the authoritarian/right wing types) have ruled out income based fine system because you are worried that it might actually be a real consequence and deterrent to you.
It’s good that no one is saying any of the things that you are saying that people can’t say.
I would say that it has failed because it does not work for the vast majority of people. The vast majority of people are not deterred from speeding, as you can see by looking out onto any road, anywhere. As you can see from my cite where speeding is responsible for quite a number of deaths and property damage.
You said that you don’t like fines as a revenue source, but that is the only way in which it is working. As far as protecting the public and preventing people from driving dangerously, it has failed.
The only people deterred from reckless driving are the small percentage that runs afoul of some problem with payment.
I agree. But I also think that there should be some method of deterring people like yourself, to whom a speeding ticket is not a big deal, from driving dangerously.
Traffic laws have worked for thousands of years? Please cite the roman ordinance for changing lanes without signaling.
Otherwise, you would see that such laws have not been in place for thousands of years, or even hundreds of years, and really, barely even decades.
No one has said anything about changing anything wholesale, no one at all. The only claims to that are the claims you are making on other’s behalf.
You say tweak it, that’s what we want to do. It’s not that hard, not at all.
You can either just have a simple relief system, where you can claim economic hardship, turn in your 1040 and show that you don’t make enough to pay the full fine, that’s easy, or you could have a system that acts to deter people from breaking the law, and have it progressive, so that the wealthy are as inconvenienced as those less off for breaking laws. That’s pretty easy to implement as well.
What exactly are cities going to be burning money doing, looking at your adjusted gross income, and multiplying it by a percent to determine your fine? How much do you really think that that costs?
I would also implement more abilities to pay, appeal or reduce your ticket through the internet or phone apps. Having to take a day off to go to a particular place at a particular time doesn’t do anyone any good, and it actually costs any municipality much more to deal with all these people individually in person than it would to just take payments or vouchers through an app.
The status quo is inefficient, ineffective and harmful to those most marginalized already. Maintaining the status quo for the sake of it being the status quo seems a poor choice, if you ask me.
All of that math is hard and complicated, but fortunately, we all have to do it yearly anyway when we do our taxes.
You have alot of “what ifs” there. How about, “What if someone has enough money that they can get out of any ticket they don’t want to pay, and therefore, do not bother to follow the traffic laws at all?”
Definitely not enough to be a deterrent. Going to jail for murder is a deterrent, so we don’t have all that many murderers. Getting a speeding ticket that doesn’t impact them is not a deterrent, as can be seen by the way that people very rarely drive the speed limit.
And then you reduce it down to an excluded middle choice, ignoring all of the reason and nuance in this thread of the other, many , options that are available to us as a society in order to get people to comply with public safety laws.
Right, like cops pulling over beater cars because they know that they will get more revenue out of someone that they can rack up fines on for everything and everything they can, and that they won’t have the resources to fight it in court.
As I mentioned, I got pulled over far more often when I was driving a '77 Delta 88, or a '85 Honda Accord, than I do driving my 2014 Ford Focus. And I am driving just the same. If you are against tickets being a revenue generator, then you would be against the uneven enforcement that is at the beginning of the “unfair” fine system.
The poor may not have much, but there are alot of them, and it’s easy to take what they do have.
You keep going on about the overhead, and I’m just not seeing how looking at a number, and multiplying it by a percentage should have all that much overhead. Calculators are not that expensive, and an app can do it for free.
We are talking about people who get a speeding ticket AND do not pay the fine AND do not go to court to explain their situation to the judge.
You’re argument seems to be if you are poor then you should be able to say fuck you to the laws and ignore them while the rest of us are expected to abide by them.
…I thought we were talking about people who get a speeding ticket AND do not pay the fine AND do not go to court to explain their situation to the judge AND then get thrown into jail AND then end up dead.
Is this person a danger to society? I think arrest and jail should be reserved for people who harm others, not people who didn’t fill out the right form or pay enough bribe money to the court.
Sure, it’s all wrapped up in legal trappings, a piece of paper with lots of official words, a big wooden desk with an old dude in robes behind it, but really it’s no different than some crooked Mexican cop telling you to give him $200 cash or he’ll arrest you on the spot. It’s true that we get the option of not paying the $200 ticket, instead taking a day off of work, waiting for a few hours at the courthouse, and then getting the ticket reduced to $150 + $45 court fee. Three cheers for justice!
And then there are “court costs.” The latest episode of the Serial podcast delves into a misdemeanor case in Cleveland that illustrates how even a minor case can cost a defendant a lot.
There should be no court costs or incarceration fees. The costs of law enforcement shouldn’t be borne by defendants.
When court costs are imposed, they aren’t defendants - they have been found guilty. Why shouldn’t the costs of law enforcement be borne by the guilty, to the degree possible? Better them than the innocent.
