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Comment by enjo | Hacker News Reader

For all of the courts crying bankruptcy I have on simple fix:

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.

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One of the hardest things you can possibly do in this country is enact a change that will lead to fewer jobs.

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.

As a taxpayer, if that's really the problem I'd rather just pay those cops, prosecutors, jail staff etc to sit around. Maybe the extra man power could be funneled toward preventing real crime (murder, rape, fraud, etc), or maybe it does nothing.

Getting nothing for that money is still better than paying them to make the world worse.

The core problem is that people think that "jobs" are good. Jobs are terrible. Productivity, health, education, these are the things we want, if you really just want jobs take every unemployed person and give them instructions to walk around a football field all day for minimum wage.

You need some mechanism of getting money into everyone's hands, since everyone needs to spend money on food/housing/etc. The market has demonstrated it isn't up to the task. Either 1) we let poor people starve, 2) we give them money, or 3) we make work for them. I like #2 (basic income). The people I meet outside of the tech bubble tend to like #1 or #3. Which camp are you in?

I think that poor people starve because the powerful keep them from living freely. Every person should have the right to set up a farm on unused land, but this gets complex in a modern society.

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.

Nobody wants to farm in this day and age.

Drop by Boulder sometime...

Who decides what land is unused?

The fact that we need some mechanism doesn't mean that any mechanism that "just works" is justifiable.

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.

There are quite a lot of infrastructure upgrades to be made. Laying fiber to every home in America, for example, or a functional high speed rail system (or better yet, a vac train network). We're far from running out of work to be done. We're not exactly at the complete make-work stage yet.

I've never heard this argument being made. The more common charge is that those who roll back the security apparatus are "soft on crime"

This is wrong It can absolutely happen, and does fairly often. I know plenty of people in research and academia who have been affected by cutbacks. Maybe we should be spreading those cost saving efforts around more than we are currently.

Maybe I should be more specific: It's hard to cut "real" jobs. Academics and research are "out of touch" with "regular folks".

At least that's how populist politicians put it.

sigh I really look forward to a science/research-based economy.

I have a different simple fix: pay for courts with taxes just like other public services.

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.)

Exactly. The moment the taxpayer starts realising the real costs of absurd policies like '3 strikes', 'Zero tolerance' and other nonsense, is the moment that you start having genuine reform in the system.

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.

100% agree. Its like the fine you get for a speeding ticket. Do they really think $75 is going to stop anyone from speeding? No, and they don't care. Its a revenue source for them so they keep it reasonably low and make up the difference in volume.

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.

If you really wanted to reduce speeding, you'd just charge a small administrative fee, and suspend driving licenses after a few infractions.

The bigger the importance of revenues from tickets, the lower the incentive to enforce speeding too well, because then too few people would speed...

Speeding tickets average closer to $150 than $75, and I think there are plenty of people who adjust their speeds to avoid them.

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.

Speeding tickets are a tax on affluenza, which I heartily approve of.

No they aren't. Plenty of poor people speed, and they get ticketed at the same rate, more or less.

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.

I wish this was actually true. But is even a 5000 dollar ticket going to matter to someone sitting on 50 million in cash? I strongly doubt it.

(I like your idea too, of course. This is just another approach.)

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!

I suspect that would work even worse than what we have now.

How so?

Well where is all the funding going to magically come from? It would require massive budgetary and bureaucratic overhaul to improve the system. Sure, prohibiting private funding might be a small part of an overhaul, but it would be nowhere near enough on its own.

Why would it require any sort of overhaul? This stuff is already largely paid for by taxes. Fines and fees are only a supplementary source of income.

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.

Courts don't charge people, prosecutors and district attorneys do.

I believe you nailed the true root cause. District attorneys have the power to choose who to charge and to what degree. It is not a DA's responsibility to weigh what is for the good of society, they need only to be concerned with conviction rates. Does that seem like the foundation for justice?

I think you've nailed the true root cause. There isn't someone elected to be on the other side of the DA, like a public defender's office whose goal it is to get accused criminals exonerated. If one political party wants both seats, they'll both have to make each other's job hard.

Courts can dismiss charges and say "stop wasting our time", though.

They can't, if you're a Judge and you cross the prosecutor too many times they will stop bringing cases to your court and you will find yourself judge of traffic court instead of criminal court. Prosecutor essentially get to pick the judges this way.

Courts can't dismiss charges just because they don't think they're worthwhile.

Unfortunately, in the US judges are elected, and the usual platform is "tough on crime". They have a metric they are optimizing for, and it's a suboptimal one.

Courts don't charge people with crimes, prosecuting attorneys do. District/State/US attorneys are not in charge of the court system.

More importantly being soft on crime isn't exactly a popular platform for politicians. Pot legalization is kind of moving in that direction and regions across the country have made progress with that. But that is a just an exception.

Courts don't charge people.

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