As Court Fees Rise, The Poor Are Paying The Price
npr.org
npr.org
Stop fucking charging so many people with crimes. The actual cause here is so obvious. Why not just stop putting people in jail so often and for so long? Reduce the number of felonies we arrest people for. Reduce the case-load and the cost of running a court goes down.
Magic!
This should also tell you something:
Some judges and politicians — even ones with reputations for being hard on crime — are starting to question whether the use of fines and fees has gone too far. The new law in Colorado was passed on a near-unanimous vote of Republicans and Democrats.
This is one of the most dysfunctional state-houses in the country. When two sides so ideologically opposed come together on any issue everyone else in the country should take note.
It's reprehensible that we require defendants to pay for their own trials. It's contrary to the very idea of justice to charge someone to go to court to defend themselves.
It's the same problem as with plea bargains, just with smaller quantities spread across many more people. The principle is the same either way: save us the trouble of proving you did what we're accusing you of, and we'll punish you less. The outcome is likewise the same either way: innocent people are coerced into admitting guilt because they fear being punished more after being found guilty in a trial.
(I like your idea too, of course. This is just another approach.)
The article uses Benton County, WA as an example, and states:
"Benton County collects just a fraction of all the fines and fees it's owed. But the county still collected $13 million in 2012 — making it one of the state's top revenue producers."
The county's most recent budget is over $100 million. Law enforcement in its various forms is around half of that. $13 million isn't trivial, but neither is it huge in context.
If you cut the fines, you'd have to increase tax revenue by a bit more than 10%. Again, not trivial, but not huge.
Consider that the money is already there and already being collected, it's just that you're disproportionately collecting it from poor people. Surely moving to a system that collects the money more evenly would make it easier, not harder, to obtain that money.
When they realise that each and every trial has an exact cost to their wallet. That we shouldn't be incentivising prosecutors and police to get a so-called conviction (eg. plea-bargain), no matter what. Then we can start on true justice. Not just for the benefit of individuals, but for the benefit of society as a whole.
It's the same idea really. This is, after all, how it used to work. Then we got "tough on crime". The argument, from the courts themselves, is that they can no longer afford to operate on their tax-funded budgets.
By charging less people with fewer crimes maybe they can get back to operating on an actual tax-payer funded budget!
If they really wanted to stop speeding they'd charge $500 for a first offense. So maybe instead of giving those departments incentive to basically rob people--and, lets face it, that's exactly what it is--we fund them through taxes. That way they can focus on doing their jobs and not on speeding ticket quotas.
A real tax on affluenza would be fines that are scaled to your net worth, with a minimum value. Say, from $75 all the way up to 1% of your worth.
There are certainly places where they exist purely as a revenue function, but I don't think that it is accurate to imply that this is the case everywhere.
The bigger the importance of revenues from tickets, the lower the incentive to enforce speeding too well, because then too few people would speed...
Prosecutors, police, and various administrative staff would suddenly have little to do and would need to be cut from payrolls.
As much as I would like it for our country to put a sense of justice ahead of "jobs", it's not going to happen.
Getting nothing for that money is still better than paying them to make the world worse.
Therefore I subscribe to geolibertarianism. Use land taxes to implement a basic income.
But let's not spread lies about how we need jobs. We don't. We need houses, and food, and comfort.
The problem is more at the root, and it's in the fact that the political system in (ahem) some countries is creating a perverse social and occupational structure.
With a certain amount of money, we can have the following system (in simplified version): - person 1 builds a jail - person 2 arrests people 3,4 and 5, for possibly trivial reasons - person 6 mantains #3,4,5 in the jail, for an excessive amount of time
Or this alternative: - person 2,6 teach primary and seconday education - person 3,4,5 get a sufficient education and have an adequate blue collar life, maybe even white collar - person 1 gets chained at the bottom of the ocean for attempting to corrupt the political system
The problem is that when in a society, crime becomes a business, the first case is what you get.
At least that's how populist politicians put it.
sigh I really look forward to a science/research-based economy.
I think all fees (and fines and proceeds from auctions of confiscated goods) should bypass local governments entirely and go directly to the state general fund to lessen the incentive to "make crime."
One example: parking tickets. Parking tickets stopped being about fairly distributing a public good decades ago. Parking tickets are now a revenue stream for cities -- and that's it. Local governments have long since forgotten their original intent.
Confiscated goods are an even more outrageous problem. Even if you aren't convicted of a crime, a police department may decide to keep your cash and your property. Often, you have to sue to get it back.
I'm convinced that if these revenue streams bypassed local governments completely, suddenly they would be a lot less interested in their enforcement.
http://www.thenation.com/article/178845/town-turned-poverty-...
A 700% rise in incarceration alone should be a sign something has gone seriously wrong with our domestic policing.
Its not more damning than impound fees that cities allow towing companies to charge. There are all sorts of ways they have to separate you from your stuff, permanently.
I am all for not permitting governments to run court systems unless they are funded by taxes. If you cannot maintain that level of service you should be disbanded.
My wife got a ticket a few weeks ago for having a brake light out.
County has a standing order that allows routine citations like that be paid outside of court for $15 and showing a receipt for repair (or new bulbs in this case).
That $15 turned into ~$60 after everything else that was tacked on, and of course had to be paid in person, etc.
Thankfully not a huge deal for us, more for time than cost. But there are a lot of people in our county that an unexpected $60 and having to miss work to pay it would ruin their month and possibly get them fired.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debtors'_prison#Modern_debtors....
The defendants are the raw materials. They're being captured and sold to modern-day plantations. This statement gets less hyperbolic every year.
Those in need of this essential service are typically cash-strapped single moms and dads. The cost of hiring a "traditional" Process Server is north of $150 - or $50+ an hour.
My service provides court document delivery and signing of the affidavit for a fraction of the price. It's an affordable alternative, and my clients seem grateful for it.
If you ever need family/civil/small claims court papers served in the Waterloo Ontario region, consider Due Process: http://dueprocess.ca