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Comment by mikeash | Hacker News Reader

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.)

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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.

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