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Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

The idea of fines as a revenue stream has never sat well with me. Fines are meant to be a disincentive. The ideal collection amount is zero. Treating them as a revenue stream creates a perverse incentive to enforce the penalty without disincentivizing the behavior.

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This is literally what happened in Belgium when politicians did budget. A piece of the expected slice was traffic fines.

So that means that any kind of system that would improve traffic other than repressive measures would cost them twice, once to fix the situation and again when they can issue less fines.

If I drive carelessly and get a meaningful fine, I'll think twice next time, irrespective of who gets the money. I only care that I am fined. Unless the police starts to administer fines when they shouldn't, all is good, right? What happened in Belgium?

I don’t know about Belgium specifically, but one of the usual issues is that it incentivises aggressive policing of minor issues that make money (like parking violations), which takes resources out of other problems (like mugging).

In some situations (cough random towns with sections of highway running through them in Texas), it incentivizes an approach to traffic enforcement which is barely distinguishable from getting mugged.

Putting the highway, into highway robbery!

Driving carefully is not a boolean. It's possible to design roads/environments (accidentally or not) in such a way that the “you drove carelessly” metric that triggers the fine statistically applies more often.

If they design the road to make it harder to follow the rules it is bad.

Bad for the driver, good for the government. That's exactly the point.

Not really. If you hit a person with your car and that person becomes disabled. It will be way more expensive for the govt in the long run compared to a few fines.

That's fine for you personally, and it may sound all good from a logical, theoretical, or academic perspective, however I personally know of people who have lost their license due to multiple fines and "demerit points" (NZ) resulting in that consequence.

The fines, and loss of license hurt them personally, professionally, and financially, but didn't change their behavior outside of the very short term.

In NZ we have people that are in and out of prison due to burglaries, robberies, etc... but the penalties don't change their longer term behavior.

There's a deeper problem, and penalties are important, but not the entire fix.

Then these people _obviously_ are not fit to drive a multi-ton killing machine at all and should have their license permanently revoked, when they had multiple chances for introspection.

I think whoever brought up the "fines as revenue" may have thought of Fenton, LA or the like: https://www.propublica.org/article/fenton-louisiana-brought-...

And yet people drive with suspended licenses every day.

Yeah, as if "criminals" cared about the laws. :D (See: gun control).

The occasional fine I get (and the prospect of getting another) does affect my driving habits and attentiveness, and it's the same for people close to me. Can't talk for others, though I'd expect this to be the norm.

Just like police departments use asset forfeiture to get money to buy their “toys” while innocent people lose their cash and cars because carrying cash is suspicious.

> The ideal collection amount is zero.

I agree with the overal position. Though I believe optimizing to collect zero fines is a bad measure.

A fine can be a relatively just mechanism to show that actions have consequences. And even the best people will occasionally make honest mistakes, so they will just get a fine instead of being persecuted for minor offences.

If fines degrade to a revenue stream, it's an indication something else is off with the financial structure inside the government. At least around here fines don't go into some official's private accounts, but I can see how they might "help" an underfunded department. Thinking about it this way, maybe we should consider funneling fines into a separate pool of money. Though I am not sure what to do when the fines are used to fix damage caused by the action (e.g. ecological damage). Governing is hard :(

If your ideal is a perfect society where everyone follows the all rules all the time you are going to be sorely disappointed. The ideal collection amount is the size of the fine multiplied by the actual occurrence of the offense. And that revenue should be strictly used for rehabilitative or restorative justice. For example, speeding fines should go to road improvements that deter speeding making roads safer. If no one’s speeding, there’s no need for that. But people will always break the law.

Yes I agree. I was replying to the suggestion to put the proceeds from fines into a general slush fund. Doing that creates an incentive to use speeding tickets to pay for police overtime and radar guns instead of traffic calming infrastructure.

The safest road is the closed one.

I just want to say that in modern times safety is put as #1 priority, while it's actually always a balance. E.g. we wanted the safest airline industry, we'd close the airports. But we balance the safety vs usefulness.

> The ideal collection amount is the size of the fine multiplied by the actual occurrence of the offense.

I don't think that's a logically self-consistent idea. The "actual occurrence of the offense" is not an inevitable pre-existing fact, it exists downstream of the size of the fine and efficiency of enforcement. If you fine people 5% of their annual income for going 1 mph over the speed limit, and put more traffic enforcement on the road, fewer people are going to speed.

So to answer the question "what's the ideal collection amount", you have to consider what the costs (economic and social) of rule breaking behavior are, and trade those off with how much behavior can be modified by fines, as well as the costs of enforcement.

Furthermore, just taking the statement at face value, the only way to actually collect the size of the fine multiplied by the actual occurrence of the offense is to successfully fine 100% of offenders or fine some non-offenders, but even if this is possible it's almost certainly not the "ideal" amount of enforcement.

> But people will always break the law.

That says a whole lot all by itself. You acknowledge that reform doesn’t work? There is always money to be made because people don’t like the set of rules set? So when people follow all those rules, make new rules that people will break to keep it going? Where does it stop?

I think the problem is:

1. How else would you penalize businesses?

2. What else would you do with fines?

If fines exist, it would seem foolish not to budget around that.

Maybe a uniform tax credit/refund for each citizen that is covered by that level of government. We the citizens can then decide if we fix the issue or continue to generate fines, but at least the budget isn't expecting revenue that could disappear (like the lack of traffic tickets during the beginning of COVID).

Governments should not operate fiscally like corporations. A financial institution will budget around fees because it's in their benefit for their customers to incur fees. A government should not budget around fines because they want the behavior which was fined to not occur at all.

I think one way to prevent bad incentives is to ensure that the organizational units that create and enforce policies are not the ones that benefit from any fines collected.

On the surface this sounds great, but governmental organizational units are still able to pressure one another, or have third parties apply pressure.

How about fines go into a sovereign wealth fund (but not be seen as major source for the fund- more a bonus) so there is no short term budget planning based on fine revenue.

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