> Being poor is 2 nights in jail because of a clerical error
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The key is what happens next. As an employed software engineer with no priors, I could negotiate. There are many things they can charge you with and it is completely at their whim which one you will get. I apologised profusely in my nice suit and walked away with a (small for me) fine. Other people in virtually the same situation got nailed to the wall. You didn't want to be one of those people arguing how unfair it was to be pulled in to court when you never got a suspension notice.
Of course, they suspended my license again without telling me. Got the notice a month(!) later. I gave up driving after that. Since then I've driven a car maybe 4 times in the last 12 years.
Sounds like they paid their fine and then got caught in the system as the result of a clerical error?
He made a mistake, paid his fine and that should have been that.
Exactly. It's not like I even made a choice to drive with a suspended license. This was nearly 20 years ago now, and it happened in a tiny no-red-light town with no computer system. The ticket was for 61 in a 55 on a downhill grade. The dead-tree paperwork that confirmed that I had paid got lost, they had the wrong address on file, and I never found out my license was suspended. Cut to 2 years later and a different blink-and-you-miss it town that happens to be on a border bottleneck is running their weekly roadblock while I happen to pass through, and next thing I know it's "Step out of the car and put your hands behind your back."
I still think that you can't complain about getting the initial fine, regardless of the size of the town where you broke the law. I also don't see how this is really connected with being poor.
If you're arguing that many speed limits are set to low I'm totally with you, but that's a separate question.
The particular section of highway I'm talking about is about a half-mile long, on a downhill grade, and changes down 10mph.
The cops sit in the middle and ticket people as they're decelerating. It's a racket, plain and simple.
Another issue for me is that things like fines obviously carry a punitive function, people break a law and you want to punish them financially and deter the future behavior. When it comes to something like jail time, the rich and the poor are punished the same, again assuming an unbiased justice system. Six months in jail is more or less the same whether you're rich or poor. On the other hand, the punitive effects of a fine vary greatly based on your wealth. A $300 speeding ticket might be a lesson in the importance of obeying traffic laws and a minor annoyance if you're middle class. On the other hand, if you're living off of $1100 per month, that could be the difference between being able to make rent or not. It isn't that the poor should get away with breaking traffic laws, traffic deaths are a huge issue so they definitely shouldn't, but the punitive effects of the fine shouldn't be so vastly different based on income. I believe some countries, I seem to remember it being some Nordic countries, base fines off of income levels.
A poor person with a suspended license cannot afford the cab ride to work and are thus forced to choose between either not going to work, losing their job and watching their children starve or taking the risk and driving. A relatively well off person just catches a cab or an uber.
An arrested poor person in jail waits days to weeks for a below average attorney to be appointed for them who will more often than not encourage them to accept a plea deal because their attorney has limited time and has to meet with 12 more poor clients today. A wealthy person has an aggressive attorney who will get to work immediately on getting their client out on bond and fighting the charges.
A poor person goes to prison. A wealthy person gets probation and is found to struggle from affluenza or a light sentence because of their "youth and clean record".
After getting out of prison a poor person struggles to find work and is stuck in a cycle. A rich person goes to a nice dinner.
Our legal system is a machine powered by the lives of the poor and the money of the wealthy.
To paraphrase an excellent line: The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges and steal bread.
A law that could target poor people is driving with expired tags. There are people who do this for reasons other than "just not getting around to it".
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/12/court-software-g...
This is "move fast and break things" taken to its ultimate logical conclusion.
Going through it all, since it ended ok, was good. I was 20 and learned even more to 1) not trust cops, 2) the courts are fallible and 3) it's more f-cked up for other people than a white kid in college (which I was but sat through a lot of other cases that day and the previous time there).