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Comment by Teever | Hacker News Reader

The solution is surprisingly simple. You just need moderate enforcement of fines that are scaled to the offenders income and that escalate exponentially with reoffense in a reasonable time period.

Fines should be designed to make it uneconomical to continue to reoffend.

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More than that, you need to enforce the existing laws. Raising the fines but continuing zero enforcement will do nothing.

Pretty sure high fines would greatly incentivize increased enforcement.

Why? The police officer gets paid the same either way. And that's probably in line with how we want it, lest police officers start seeing infractions that don't exist when their daughter's next birthday comes near.

The officer, sure. But departmental policy?

That can help, but policy doesn't execute itself, it's executed through the police officers. Most cities aren't prepared to be able to follow-through to the logical conclusion the steps they'd need to take if their police force is fully intransigent with regard to following policy, so the policy itself is set based in part on what the force itself is willing to enforce.

Either I'm confused or maybe you didn't understand my point - why wouldn't the department want to execute a policy that benefits them greatly through increased revenue? If it's not profitable or desirable to do so, increase the fines.

The fines are already plenty high, it's just that they are essentially not enforced at all. You could definitely illegally commute everyday in a carpool lane, and expect to maybe get a $409 ticket between 0 and 1 times every 5 years or so.

A $490 ticket every 5 years works out to only $1.88 per week- effectively free for anyone that makes enough money to commute in a car in the first place.

They increase the fine for repeat tickets.

> The solution is surprisingly simple

Has this been tested and shown to be successful or is your confidence based on feels?

Look up the concept of "day fines", which are used in Finland elsewhere:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day-fine

Surprisingly they were experimented with in the UK, for a very brief period of time. But not taken into use.

Every now and again a particularly large fine, often for speeding, will make the news. For example this story does the rounds now and again "Finland, Home of the $103,000 Speeding Ticket":

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/03/finland...

That doesn't answer the question, do they work better than flat fines and points on licenses (that lead to suspensions)?

How do you decide if something like that works? Is it by stats on "repeat offenders", or something else?

All I can say is that when you've been asked to pay €50,000 for speeding I suspect you'll be hesitant to speed again, and so I believe the system works.

So the answer to the original question is that your confidence was based on feels.

That sort of stuff makes for great fantasy for people who fancy themselves central planners but back in the real world it flied in the face of the principals of a) punishment fitting the crime b) justice being blind-ish, which "real society" values far more than internet comment sections would have you believe.

I disagree. Not charging a rich person enough to incentivize them to change means that the punishment doesn't fit the crime for them. Similarly, charging people a fine proportionate to their wealth is much more just than a fine that is devistating for the poor but insignificant for the rich.

I’m generally not a lefty type person, but aren’t resource agnostic fines actually less blind-justice than the alternative?

The wealthy speeder shrugs it off, while the poor speeder has to change their spending allocation in a way that is noticeable and could be challenging.

Why should the punishment have a different impact based on wealth? The felt impact of a monetary fine fundamentally depends on how much money the offender has. Whereas the classic “locked in a cage” punishment affects everyone equally.

That should only be the case if the fine was actually prosecuted in court.

Plenty of people pay the fine and admit to guilt to avoid being further penalized with court fees, etc. In other words, many people just pay a injustice fine to avoid more trouble. This would punish those type of people even more.

>Plenty of people pay the fine and admit to guilt to avoid being further penalized with court fees, etc.

The system is in fact architected to maximize this in some states. Virginia and Ohio come to mind.

> Fines should be designed to make it uneconomical to continue to reoffend.

Great. Fine me $1 million, and I will fight the case with lawyers, thus slowing down the public legal system for thousands of other legal cases, whether traffic related or otherwise.

IDK why this is downvoted. In practice everything is this way. Anything over a few grand is basically an invitation to lawyer up and fight. Whether it's a traffic fine or some local zoning BS this is always how it goes.

And by "IDK" I mean "I have some suspicions but they're not flattering to the community".

High definition cameras are cheap, I don’t see why these “fights” would be costly.

>I don’t see why these “fights” would be costly.

Most of society doesn't share most of HN's pro-jackboot disposition so there'd be warnings, appeals, etc, etc.

As a comparison point, it took a 20yr frog boiling exercise to turn DUI into a huge state revenue stream and that's at least backed by a crime most people can agree is fairly serious. To get the same for less serious crime you'd need to invest even more up front in propaganda because people aren't dropping dead from road infractions today like they were 40+yr ago so your ability to appeal to emotion is even more limited.

We can't even release the Epstein files. We don't go full jackboot on petty crimes with a victim. To think that there's public apetite to ruinously fine motorists out of large sums of money over petty victimless infractions is Luxury Space Communism (TM) type tone deaf lunacy.

And this is all assuming you get a bunch of friendly judges because this stuff is pushing it in terms of what the 6/7/8/14th amendments will tolerate.

Like FFS, get out of your filter bubble people.

You're being downvoted by people for whom this would be incredibly inconvenient.

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