60 days in jail for not paying a $2.75 subway fare costs the city $22,000 | Hacker News Reader

60 days in jail for not paying a $2.75 subway fare costs the city $22,000

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119 pointslaurex117 comments

"I could demonstrate to you that every single bank robbery, that in every single case practically, the cost of the police was more than the actual money that the robbers took from the bank. Does that mean, 'Oh, you see, there's really no economic interest involved, then. They're not protecting the banks. The police are just doing this because they're on a power trip, or they're macho, or they're control freaks, that's why they do it.' No, of course it's an economic... of course they're defending the banks. Of course, because if they didn't stop that bank robbery, regardless of the cost, this could jeopardize the entire banking system." -- Michael Parenti

Despite quoting that I'm not a hardcore leftist (anymore). But I think it's an insightful quote, and does at least explain why certain crimes are handled the way they are. That being said, this simply shouldn't be a criminal matter, and should be handled more similarly to overdue parking meters, as some say in the twitter comments.

(Also, that quote is out of context, it is itself serving as an example to explain the (lack of) roi for american interventionism in South America. And yes I used to listen to a lot of Choking Victim)

But it didn't cost $22,000. If he didn't go to a jail would the city save $22k?

The city lost $215,000,000 in revenue due to the fare evasion.

That assumes people would pay the money otherwise. Which is almost certainly not true.

The people who don’t pay likely don’t have the money in the first place or are drunk. It’s unlikely they would have paid any ways.

I like the French system of school lunches. Every student has a card to pay for lunch. The exact price charged is on a sliding scale depending on family income. One child has no idea what the other is charged, it's just a swipe of the card.

You're also not allowed to bring your own lunch to eat in the cafeteria, but that system can work out okay when you have dedicated chefs at each school, and cheap good cheese (and funding for... children to eat... a bizarre concept in some parts of the world).

Not allowed to bring your own? You think this is a good thing? God forbid I make some food at home. Sounds like a protection racket to me or a social equality experiment gone crazy.

If the provided lunch is any good, then yes, a good thing.

Could some families afford the cost and time of providing a better 2-4 course lunch every day? Sure, but most won’t.

As a child, I had a wide array of food allergies, so doctors put me on a so-called rotation diet. I could only be exposed to certain food items once every 4 days. Day 1 of the cycle allowed wheat and rye, so on the other days, I could not eat any dish with sauce bound with wheat flour. (My family used carob seed flour instead.) Day 2 was potatoes, day 3 was corn, day 4 was rice. (Those were the most significant items. There was more on the diet plan.)

This is why, for the first 4 years of school, I went to a specialized school for physically and mentally disabled children. I was not really disabled (besides allergies and asthma), but that was the only school where the cafeteria personnel was able/willing to accommodate my needs. (My grandmother brought in precooked food for me for the next day when she picked me up from school.) When I changed to secondary school, my parents employed some legal tricks to get me into a school close to my grandmother's apartment, so I could go to her place for lunch.

I realize that I was an edge case. But I sure hope that the laws governing those French kids accommodate their edge cases.

It’s probably similar to the Nordics. Which is that it’s the schools responsibility to cater to your needs, no matter the costs. Just be sure to have a doctors note.

I don't think the children are making food at home, and it seems entirely reasonable to prevent rich parents from giving food to their preferred children. If you can't fight generational inequality in a small thing, how can you fight generational inequality in big things like inheritance?

I suspect the rich kids go to private boarding schools no? The policy hurts the upper end of the average kids.

> how can you fight generational inequality in big things like inheritance?

France gets a big fail on this one. It's incredibly difficult to completely dis-own your children in your will.

It's unclear why this is but a quick search will show that children are not required to eat at school at all, so they are free to eat at home or off campus somewhere too.

>One child has no idea what the other is charged, it's just a swipe of the card.

I disagree with this assertion. If everyone knows the rules of the game, there will be plenty of guesswork as to how much whom is paying. "Just" a swipe of the card does not make social inequality evaporate. And, in my personal experience, this leads to more prejudice, not less. To me, this screams oversimplification by the state (or whoever is responsible for making school lunches "politically correct").

Is it perfect? No. Is it better than most other systems to inequality? Yes.

There’s little difference between this system and a system of direct payments to address the inequality.

This system also eliminates the potential of the family squandering any direct payments.

> I like the French system of school lunches. Every student has a card to pay for lunch. The exact price charged is on a sliding scale depending on family income.

I never really understood the whole "Free if your parents aren't rich" mentality. Parents of rich kids pay more tax so why not give them free lunches as well since they pay for it indirectly anyway? Reduces bureaucracy. We do that in Sweden. The same thing can be said about most things, like higher education, healthcare etc.

That system would work for school lunches. It would not work as well for an oversubscribed transit system where users may not live where the system is and you want to provide some incentive for people to live where they work, bike, carpool or travel at off-peak times.

And if they handed out $50 tickets for fare evasion, how much revenue would that generate?

It's already a $100 fine:

http://web.mta.info/nyct/rules/TransitAdjudicationBureau/rul...

NYC.gov says 14,000 summons ($100 fine) in Q4.

Who knows what percentage of those are paid.

But relative to the size of the problem that’s a pittance.

You almost always have the option of going to jail to pay fines, typically at $50-100/day served.

Was on the train here in Houston yesterday, and this very topic came up as some folks were chatting with a transit officer onboard. Some said they'd always sit in jail rather than pay a fine.

The person who can't afford $2 is now going to pay $50? From where? How?

Have them spend a shift cleaning garbage. Done.

I see we're leaning real hard into that "except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted" thing.

Okay, good point. I was being far too glib.

We could give them money for that (just to take it away again), but they probably won't produce $50 of value without getting someone else to stay home who also has debts to pay.

So I guess this is more of a belief in the value of work thing. Which is OK, but I think this would have more value if we could then offer offenders a chance to continue to clean and then earn money, but we don't have jobs to offer them after we made up this cleaning one as a punishment.

This is the epitome of undercutting good hard-working American jobs. This is why prison labor is so toxic. If it's bad to have illegal aliens sneaking into the country and taking jobs why isn't forcing people into unpaid jobs? The weirdest thing for me is seeing the same people advocate for both.

If you caught every instance of someone breaking a law then the fines can be pretty low.

Eg If you knew that there was a 99% chance that you'd be fined every time for minor traffic offenses (going 5k over the speed limit, failure to indicate, etc) then the fine could be $20 and nobody would do it. Instead the fine is much higher but only a small proportion are caught.

It also works for major offenses. Longer jail sentences don't deter crime as much as the likelihood of being caught.

Despite quoting that I'm not a hardcore leftist (anymore).

I don't see that as a leftist quote. The police aren't supposed to be a profit center.

The idea that the police are supposed to be a profit center is a neo-liberal thing not liberal or conservative.

You can make an argument that based on enforcement costs, the subsidies alternative transportation receive, and the externalities of such that the optimal fare price for public transportation is negative. If the optimal fair price is negative then you shouldn't charge fares at all. You can find leftists, conservatives, fascists that agree with that.

Well the man who said it is a leftist, and was making a leftist point overall. But out of context it is more of a neutral analysis.

former anarcho crust punks rise up o7

Ok, but when was the last time anyone ever went to jail for wage theft? Once you look at which crimes lead to arrest and the racial/economic background of those arrested, this quote quickly stops making sense. It's the broken windows theory, plain and simple.

What do you think the meaning of the quote is I guess? One point of the quote is that protection of the concept of private property is a function of the police. It's more of a piece of (I think accurate) neutral analysis with how I've used it, but I think you have a different perspective on what this means if you think it "stops making sense."

You can't compare bank robbery, it's usually done with force or threat of force. The tellers are usually traumatized...

This seems to be an unfair comparison to me. The penalty for not paying the fare is not meant to somehow recuperate the lost cost - instead, the penalty is there to incentivize people to pay the regular fare, rather than skipping it. The real question to ask is: if the penalty were reduced, how much more money would be lost due to the increased number of people not paying the subway fare? I don't see a good way to answer this question, but it seems to be the right comparison to me.

This is the right way to frame the question. It's pretty obvious that the purpose of such disproportionate punishment is to discourage everybody from breaking the rules; you can't just look at the individual that got caught.

If one is going to make an argument for any specific level of punishment for this offense, it should be based on the expected total cost/benefit across the entire population.

> you can't just look at the individual that got caught

Of course you can. Legal systems must be proportional to everybody. The non-existence of collective punishment is one of the pillars of Democracy.

That's not saying that the fine shouldn't be larger than the offense (of course it should), but proportionality must be maintained at the personal level for everybody.

I feel like this must be common in most cases, but I have only one data point to back it up:

In 2014, I was working for a startup when I found out the founder had embezzled/stolen our investor money, lied to creditors, stolen employee salaries and W2 tax contributions, etc. and used the money to fund his big apartment, private schools for his children, two full-time nannies, and a nice BMW. After we found out we all resigned and the following Monday were sitting in the DA's office (financial crimes). The DA decided to pick up the case (fortunately, mostly because it was an absolute slam dunk after he confessed to it all through email) and it took them literally 3 years of interviews, research, etc to take the case to grand jury. Eventually, he plead guilty and has to pay back roughly 650K to employees + investors, but NYC must have spent well over 1MM to get that money back to us.

The only person that actually paid a lawyer in this case was the person who plead guilty, and of course, the tax payers of NYC

I don't know enough to take a position on this issue one way or another, but I think it should be pointed out that expensive jail time for a few people could serve as a deterrent that results in enough increased fare revenue to offset the cost.

This line of thinking has two serious problem: it assumes that people

1) Actually intentionally break the law as a choice and 2) Actually think about the consequences of their actions

And to a lesser extent, this ignores the subset of circumstances where people forget to pay, actually do pay but the payment gets lost, or can't afford to pay but need to get places.

This is why 3-strike rules are abject failures (life in prison for stealing a slice of pizza?). Crime and punishment are enormously complicated and the "obvious" solutions almost never actually work.

Neither of those points is an excuse for breaking the law unless you're mentally ill. In which case you should still be locked up but this time in a mental institution.

Just pay for your ticket or walk.

You're confusing a moral judgement rooted in emotional conceptions of 'justice' (what one 'should' do) with a logical response to a systematic problem (how to most effectively ameliorate antisocial behaviour). Which is, in a nutshell, exactly why retributive policing and the carceral state have failed spectacularly.

If we just stopped enforcing the laws, the damage to our society would be incalculable.

Is it worth it to prosecute petty thefts for less than $100? If not, then we are giving the green light to that kind of crime. What incentive would you have to run a small business selling things if the state won't enforce the law?

> This line of thinking has two serious problem: it assumes that people 1) Actually intentionally break the law as a choice and 2) Actually think about the consequences of their actions

I lived in New York City, and saw the people who tried that in Bushwick. I actually agree that there are sadly many adults who completely dysfunctional. But that does not mean that we should just abandon our laws. Is it not a much bigger problem that we have people who simply can not help but break the law?

I don't think GP is saying we shouldn't enforce laws that don't make sense economically. Rather, if all it takes to follow the law is pay $2.75, and people break it over 200,000 times per day, maybe it's time to reevaluate whether the law and consequences are effective?

> What incentive would you have to run a small business selling things if the state won't enforce the law?

Small businesses exist even in places with no laws. Not saying it is a good idea to not have laws, or not enforce them, but it isn't like EVERYTHING ceases to work when laws aren't enforced.

I also don't think the effect is incalculable. We have lots of examples of places where the government collapses and there is no longer any enforcement of the law. We could certainly research the effect his has on the economy.

I am in no way arguing that we should abandon laws or stop enforcing petty crime, just saying it isn't quite that simple.

> Small businesses exist even in places with no laws

Only because other power structures emerge with their own rules. I think I’ll take laws over "lawlessness".

It's generally the case that a significant chance of being caught is a much bigger deterrent than a significant punishment if you are caught.

https://nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx

We are moving towards a state where technology will allow us to punish every infraction every time, automatically and at low marginal processing cost. I expect that rebalancing the punishments to match the new likelihood of getting caught will lag by at least 5-10 years, causing greater social problems in the interim.

> I think it should be pointed out that expensive jail time for a few people could serve as a deterrent that results in enough increased fare revenue to offset the cost

Rational deterrence theory and associated studies generally hold that the scale of deterrence means very little if it isn't reliably put into use.

That is to say, picking out a few unlucky rule violators and inflicting tremendous punishments on them has very little effect, while reliably inflicting minor punishments on most people who violate the rules has a much more noticeable effect on compliance.

Ok, now make the same argument for those guilty of wage theft and see how much push back you get.

(Estimates suggest wage theft and shoplifting both cost the US economy ~$40 billion/year. But one of these crimes results in virtually zero jail time.)

What is behind the US love affair with jail? It's perverse.

This looks like outrage fuel. I'm really not seeing meaningful solutions proposed.

It's quite common in the US to do things like prosecute a notorious mafioso on tax evasion because they can't prove the murders etc. that he's responsible for. We don't know all the details of this specific case.

Yes, I get it, our entire 'justice' system is the worst element of a nation with a long history of racism. I wish we would find real remedies.

I don't see this particular thing really adding substantive discussion and furthering solutions.

Can anyone tell me what constructive purpose this serves?

Thanks.

> I'm really not seeing meaningful solutions proposed.

Stop jailing people for nonviolent crimes. Give the turnstile jumper the same treatment as the embezzler. Reduce the ridiculous US prison population!

Everyone's getting hung up on the 22k, but 60 days in jail for jumping a turnstile is insane at any price.

I agree completely. If I were sentenced to even a week in jail for jumping a turnstile, I'd still feel like they'd thrown the book at me.

That $22000 amounts to good wages for everyone involved, though. A lot of people eating off the taxpayer for that one arrest, so less incentive to "fix" the problem. It's only a problem to the taxpayer, and to the taxpayer, it's worth it to stick it to that guy who jumped the fare even if it costs tons of money because it's unfair ( I paid, you didn't ). This is pretty fundamental human psychology.

It most certainly does not amount to good wages for the person who is in jail for not paying a $2.75 fare. Their 60 days in jail will have long-lasting implications on their livelihood for the rest of their life. There are grave "collateral consequences" we must consider. (Read https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2512920 for more on what this looks like.)

Then they should have thought about that before they decided to commit a crime. Life is about choices and consequences, and being overly permissive with those who have no qualms about breaking the law leads to a sick society where those who do actually follow the law are the ones who suffer.

We aren't talking about the individual person here, we are talking about the macro effect of this type of enforcement. Obviously having the severe penalty did not stop this particular person from committing the crime; the question is, how many people DID it stop, and is the number of people it stopped worth the cost?

No one is trying to defend the person, just trying to reason about what is best for our society as a whole.

We should just make the subway free. $2.75 doesn't come close to covering the cost of the ride, so why add a regressive tax on what amounts to a basic need?

Given that 40% of the budget for the typical subway comes from fares, that sounds unviable http://web.mta.info/mta/budget/pdf/MTA-2018-AdoptedBudgetFeb...

The local population finance 100% of the costs one way or the other. Why taking the same money by one route is perfectly normal while the same amount from another route not viable?

I like this idea but think it has some practical problems. The money needs to come from somewhere. Normally I'd say just move it to some other form of existing taxation like income tax or property taxes. However, a reasonably large portion of regular subway users are people that live in New Jersey but commute to work in New York. You'd probably need to figure out a way to get money from these people as well. Potentially this could be done with some added fees on Ferries and other transit options between New Jersey and New York but it would require some thought and planning.

How about some kind of RFID card (like the Clipper Card system in the SF Bay Area), but with all payments waived if you have proof of residency in the cit(y|ies) served?

> However, a reasonably large portion of regular subway users are people that live in New Jersey but commute to work in New York. You'd probably need to figure out a way to get money from these people as well.

One option would be to tax the employers: https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2018/11/06/mountain...

The ride is a fixed cost to some extent no matter how many people ride the train. The system gets $2.75 times the thousands that ride that one train. So it's $2.75 times many thousands and not just $2.75.

It costs $500/night to jail someone in NYC? You could put them in a room at the Four Seasons for less than that.

At that rate it's nearly cheaper to send them to Princeton with full room and board: https://admission.princeton.edu/cost-aid/fees-payment-option...

> It costs $500/night to jail someone in NYC? You could put them in a room at the Four Seasons for less than that.

But then there'd be no-one stopping them from leaving.

Also the minibar and room-service charges would make the Four Seasons stay far more expensive. I'm sure the jail cost includes all meals.

Hyatt with an ankle bracelet?

I could see a politician justifying the $500 a night by saying the money is going back into the local economy and creating jobs at the jail.

Can someone explain it to me, why in SF its treated as a minor ticket similar to overdue parking meters as apposed to NYC where people are jailed for not having a valid ticket ? Never thought NYC could be soo ridiculous.

Because it's usually fined $100, that means something else is going on.

Could you elaborate ?

I am going to guess that he's a repeated offender and didn't pay previous tickets.

It is largely treated as a minor ticket in NYC as well I believe.

This wasn't a case of not having a valid ticket. This was a case of turnstile jumping. There is a big difference in intent there.

Could you please explain the difference in intent? Sounds to me like its someone trying to ride for free in both cases.

Some people might be just trying to get away with not paying a parking meter deliberately, but we can't prove that when writing parking tickets. Most people probably just forget or cut it a little too close with their plans when they overstay a parking meter.

I thought you were comparing it to not having a valid ticket for transit in SF. I can see that it would be harder to prove intent in the parking meter situation.

You can forget to bring your ride pass with you, or forget to purchase a ticket or accidentally purchase the wrong ticket. Or e.g. with Caltrain you can forget to swipe your clipper at the boarding station.

Jumping a turnstile isn't merely oversight; it's intentionally trying to avoid paying the fare.

NYPD has a long history of implementing the "broken windows" theory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#New_York...

why not fine the person ? Like parking tickets. Jailing someone for something as minor as this is beyond stupid.

The obvious answer is that the US prison system is a replacement for our former use of chattel slavery.

When I was in Prague my buddies and I decided to skip out on the fare. I was very young, dumb, and wanted to look cool.

On the train the police walk around checking tickets rather than having a ticketing booth etc. We obviously got caught.

We got fined what I think was $500 each and we deserved it. I should have just paid the $2.75.

Edit: I think it was Prague it's been a really long time.

Well broken windows worked didn't it? NYC went from being the most dangerous city in the US to one of the safest.

Crime in NYC did drop precipitously, but it's not clear that broken windows policing was the cause. It's been studied and debated a lot, but as far as I can tell there isn't a clear consensus. Here are some sources:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theory#New_York... * https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/13/why-did-crime-...

I'd imagine the cost of arrests and incarceration are sunk costs though.

It's not like we pay the police $2,000 for each arrest, or pay the prison $500/night per inmate.

Does anyone know if these numbers were taken by adding up the costs of running a prison and police department and dividing by the number of arrests and inmates?

If so, it's a little disingenuous to make this argument.

Also, these cases are not about a 1:1 relationship of harm to society vs. cost of justice. If you let the crimes go, you'll have more people doing it because "everybody does it".

60 days in jail does seem pretty excessive though. If imagine tons of young kids or people in a rush would make a silly mistake.

but if we didn't arrest all those people we wouldn't need as many police or as much prison space .... they're not sunk, just costs that can go away over time if you don't need to pay them

> It's not like we pay the police $2,000 for each arrest

Not in a direct sense - but civil asset forfeiture and arrest/citation quotas do incentivize individual officers to take actions that benefit their department's budget and their annual review, respectively.

> It's not like we [...] pay the prison $500/night per inmate

In the case of private prisons (which house 8% of the US prison population[0]), a per-prisoner stipend is the most popular[1] business model.

The government quite literally pays the prison company a fixed dollar amount per inmate-night, which the company then turns a profit on.

[0]: https://reason.org/wp-content/uploads/files/comparing_correc...

[1]: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/062215/busin...

I don't understand why for-profit prisons even exist. It just sets up perverse incentives and encourages unnecessary incarceration.

True, but the reference is to Riker's island which is a public prison.

> This doesn't include the cost of their arraignment, court staff, prosecutor or lawyer.

Then it does seem a bit excessive.

$366 per day? Something isn't right when the original cost of the 'crime' amounts to almost 11 minutes of jail time... and instead they end up serving over two months. Is it always this imbalanced?

If there was no punishment, how much would it cost the city in more skipped fares?

That said, I don't think anyone actually goes to prison for a skipped fare. There are better punishments out there.

Since she's debating economics: maybe jail for some scares others...enough to make back the $22K spent for them?

Good. Jail for such an infraction is fucking absurd. The city should change its stupid laws. I wish it cost more, really. This is what the city government wishes to use its monopoly on violence on? Say the turnstile hopper doesn't stop then gets into a chase that ends up with either him or the cop dead. Would that be worth it? Would the city reconsider its dumbass laws then? A simple fine would be plenty.

$500*60 days +$2k =$32k

The series of tweets addresses that. They are calculating it based on serving 40 days because that's how much of the sentence you will probably serve.

thanks.

They should just charge a $50 fine on the spot, or take a shoe.*

* Nobody wants to lose a shoe, plus it stimulates the local economy (at least the shoe stores.)

Is it moral and right to post these divisive headlines without even the basic context of line item cost breakdown?

Putting someone in jail for breaking the law isn't about costs. Besides before you know it nobody pays for their ticket and then what? This is a nice deterrent for any other sad sack who thinks he is above the rules.

Why not fine them instead?

Before you say, not everyone can afford XYZ fine. I would fully support a income based proportional fine system in the US.

What i Don't support is putting someone in jail because they can't afford a lawyer.

What do you do about people with no money?

With BART especially, you can watch the same person that jumped the gate light up a meth pipe in the back of the train car.

BART police will kick them off the train if they get caught but can't really do much else since the city doesn't really prosecute for drug offenses. If you look at the arrest records, you see the same people arrested day after day. They don't have any money.

I'd like to see a program that gives the option of jail or rehab+community service.

I like this suggestion as well. People without money can instead do community service instead.

This is almost the definition of the slippery slope fallacy.

No one is arguing there should be no deterrent at all. The argument is that the current punishment is too high and is well beyond being a reasonable deterrent.

Well this deterrent isn't really working. Fare evasion is currently a big problem for the MTA (http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/03/mta-fare-evasion-one-...)

It's also not clear to me that it is ethical to have a punishment be far more extreme than a crime. Sending someone to jail for 40 days for stealing $2.75 seems a little extreme. That could easily turn a poor person with a job into a homeless person with no job.

A fine feels more appropriate. Maybe free rides for those who legitimately can't afford the fare.

I agree on the principle, but shouldn't we examine if the deterrent is working? Can we look at rates of fare jumping in places with less strict laws? Maybe try reducing the penalty and see if rates of fare jumping actually increase?

People tend to act like it is a given that a stricter penalty decreases the occurrence of the crime, but that isn't always the case.

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