Fragile Bird Posted March 28, 2015 Share Posted March 28, 2015 There are some times when only the English have the right word to describe a situation. I just watched John Oliver's Last Week Tonight program on municipal violations and have been left gobsmacked. https://www.youtube.com/user/LastWeekTonight Oliver showed interview after interview with people, typically poor people, who have received municipal fines that have totally destroyed lives. Studies have shown that some of these huge fines have lead to 60% of people losing their jobs, because they could not pay their minor offence, lost their driver's license, then lost their job. A $255.50 ticket for speeding in Alabama would take almost a week's wages for a minimum wage employee. The actual fine for running a stop sign in California is $35, but there are 10 different additional fees put on that fine, increasing it to $238. In New Orleans, you can sign up to a payment plan, but the payment plan costs $100. If you get a parking ticket for $50 and can't pay it, you have to pay $150!!! And there are 44 states that allow such marvellous payment plans. In Ferguson Missouri, one of the ways racism is manifested is by the number of fines the police hand out. Guess who gets the most municipal fines? An example - a woman received $152 in fines for 2 parking tickets. So far she has paid $550 in fines and fees, and still owes $541 to Ferguson for the $152 in parking fines. Another case. A $25 ticket + court costs = $41. Since she couldn't pay, the woman was handed over to a private probation company, which charged her $35 a month on top of every payment she made, with the payments going towards their fee first. This woman has paid and paid, without reducing her fine whatsoever. She told a judge she had $41 to pay the fine, but could not afford the $41 + the $35, and the judge told her that wasn't his problem. Then there was the case of veteran who stole a $2 can of beer. He was fined, and couldn't pay it. He was handed over to probation services, which put a monitor on him at a cost of $360 a month. A guy who couldn't pay for a $2 can of beer. He ended up being jailed repeatedly, at $50 a day, and served 50 to 70 days of jail time. What kind of crazy country do you people live in? Have any of you been caught in one of these wildly spiralling fine situations, or do you know some one trapped like this? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ser Scot A Ellison Posted March 28, 2015 Share Posted March 28, 2015 Last year I got a ticket for missing a "no left turn" sign that went up on a street I was familier with but hadn't driven down in quite a while. The fine was over $300.00 and it was a 4 point ticket. I went to court planning to demand a Jury trial and was informed that if I did so, the fine (if I was convicted) doubled. :shocked: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fragile Bird Posted March 28, 2015 Author Share Posted March 28, 2015 Last year I got a ticket for missing a "no left turn" sign that went up on a street I was familier with but hadn't driven down in quite a while. The fine was over $300.00 and it was a 4 point ticket. I went to court planning to demand a Jury trial and was informed that if I did so, the fine (if I was convicted) doubled. :shocked: Oh yeah, have your day in court, right? That is just nasty. Here it's $110.00 and 2 demerit points, none of that doubling nonsense if you fight the ticket, plus a "Victim Fine Surcharge". We followed the lead of California in essentially tacking on additional penalties to every ticket, except parking tickets, to build up a fund to compensate innocent victims of crime. The surcharge starts at $10 for fines under $50, and goes up by $5 every %50 until it hits $450 - $500, then goes to $110, $125 for $500 to $1,000, and then 25% of the fine if over $1,000. If you fail to pay a ticket on time there are court costs tacked on, which range from $5 to $30. Ironically, just this week our province announced it will start seriously going after $135M in unpaid fines. I hope they don't allow private corporations to do the idiotic stuff John Oliver mentions in his program. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
karaddin Posted March 28, 2015 Share Posted March 28, 2015 I remember reading an article about this sort of thing a couple of years ago as an example of how people get caught in a poverty trap. As with these it started with a parking ticket, which after being unpaid for a short time caused the husband to lose his license in an area where driving was literally the only way to get to work. Queue losing jobs, driving unlicensed, getting more fines and eventually ending up in prison as basically life for the entire family went down the shitter with no hope for even the next generation to get back up. Not even bootstrapping! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liffguard Posted March 28, 2015 Share Posted March 28, 2015 I generally try not to ascribe to malice what could better be explained by incompetence, but this system seems actively designed to keep the poor and unempowered stuck in poverty. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Egalitarianism Always Posted March 28, 2015 Share Posted March 28, 2015 Karaddin, it's the prison industrial complex at work. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zelticgar Posted March 28, 2015 Share Posted March 28, 2015 The fines suck but the insurance surcharges are even worse. It is a bit of a spiral scenario because once you start getting your registration or license cancelled your insurance company will cancel coverage and then you have to deal with the fines, registration costs, insurance re-activation and then increased cost for coverage because you are now deemed a higher risk driver. It also makes you a target for arrest for driving without a license, registration or insurance. I see a lot of there types of arrests in my area when you look through the police logs. I can see both sides of this argument though. There are a lot of crappy and irresponsible drivers out there and having stiff fines will hopefully make them think twice about driving like morons. I dont think it is accurate to call fine policies racist but they certainly effect the less affluent similar to how the lotteries prey on the poor for money. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ser Scot A Ellison Posted March 28, 2015 Share Posted March 28, 2015 Zelt,Look at the distribution of fines in Ferguson Missouri and you will find blacks disproportinately impacted by those fines. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
eyenon15 Posted March 28, 2015 Share Posted March 28, 2015 Court costs are a bitch, I'm sure puzzled as to why it takes $250 for 5 minutes of the courts time Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
zelticgar Posted March 28, 2015 Share Posted March 28, 2015 Sorry Scott, i had to edit my post. I wrote "polices" instead of "policies". What i meant is that I don't find the idea of harsh fines inherently racist. There are problems in a lot of places with police and race but this is more of an socioeconomic issue. I think having tough penalties to discourage bad behavior is in general a good idea. We only need to look at the decline in tobacco usage to see how this can be effective. I think in the case of moving violations a system of confusion has been created that has spiraled out of control. The act of the officers and municipalities issuing fines in really just a small part of the iceburg. The escalating penalties, lack of payment plan options, and the power of the motor vehicle registries and insurance companies to add extra charges is the real problem. The state governments have created systems where not only is it expensive but it is complex navigating the bureaucracies. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liffguard Posted March 28, 2015 Share Posted March 28, 2015 The act of the officers and municipalities issuing fines in really just a small part of the iceburg. The escalating penalties, lack of payment plan options, and the power of the motor vehicle registries and insurance companies to add extra charges is the real problem. The state governments have created systems where not only is it expensive but it is complex navigating the bureaucracies. Yeah it's not really the initial fines that are the problem, but the escalating spiral. If someone can't meet the original penalty, then by what means could they possibly be expected to meet the subsequent penalties? You can't get blood from a stone after all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fragile Bird Posted March 28, 2015 Author Share Posted March 28, 2015 There is a whole system in the US of being able to tack on 'service fees' to all kinds of bills, some of which ideas are creeping into Canada. Like $25 service charges for a late payment on credit card bills (struck down by the courts as an attempt to charge extra interest). So now some cards increase the interest rate by 50% if you miss a payment. Really ferocious, imho. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
paddington Posted March 28, 2015 Share Posted March 28, 2015 It does feel at times that the entire system is designed to get people into debt, and to keep them in it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Commodore Posted March 28, 2015 Share Posted March 28, 2015 nanny state leftist complains about government fines... If Oliver interviewed someone about the topic (Rand Paul perhaps) rather than his 20 minute scripted soapbox, they might say this is the product of the thousands of chicken shit laws controlling everything we do. Case in point, Eric Garner. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Liffguard Posted March 28, 2015 Share Posted March 28, 2015 Except, as already mentioned, it's not the fines themselves that are the problem. It's the subsequent late payment fees, administration fees, interest, loss of licenses, loss of insurance etc. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ser Scot A Ellison Posted March 28, 2015 Share Posted March 28, 2015 Liffguard,The problem is that if the fines are assesed disporpantantly upon those who can't pay them it pushes them in a viscious cycle where the fines get even higher. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wise Fool Posted March 28, 2015 Share Posted March 28, 2015 nanny state leftist complains about government fines... If Oliver interviewed someone about the topic (Rand Paul perhaps) rather than his 20 minute scripted soapbox, they might say this is the product of the thousands of chicken shit laws controlling everything we do. Case in point, Eric Garner. Problem is clearly with the fines and the system of payments, not with the laws or the number of them. However, you are right that an interview with Rand Paul would have yielded stupid, whiny generalizations and been much less effective or interesting. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Commodore Posted March 28, 2015 Share Posted March 28, 2015 Problem is clearly with the fines and the system of payments, not with the laws or the number of them. how should they be enforced? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The guy from the Vale Posted March 28, 2015 Share Posted March 28, 2015 Preferably by not immediately adding fees in excess of the original fine to them? Since the state is also supposed to serve its people, perhaps by offering payment plans that don't send the fined into a debt spiral? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fragile Bird Posted March 28, 2015 Author Share Posted March 28, 2015 As John Oliver's story points out, the system today effectively brings beck debtors' prisons for many of the poor people who get caught up in this spiral of fines and added fines. Here's the opening paragraphs from the Debtors' Prison piece in Wikipedia, with my emphasis:A debtors' prison is a prison for people who are unable to pay debt. Through the mid 19th century, debtors' prisons (usually similar in form to locked workhouses) were a common way to deal with unpaid debt in Western Europe.[1] Destitute persons unable to pay a court-ordered judgment would be sentenced to these prisons until they had worked off their debt via labor or secured outside funds to pay the balance; the product of their labor went towards both the costs of their incarceration and their accrued debt. Increasing access and lenience throughout the history of bankruptcy law have made prison terms for unaggravated indigence illegal over most of the world; the US Constitution, for example, explicitly forbids incarceration as punishment for indigence.Since the late 20th century, the term debtors' prison has also sometimes been applied by social justice critics to criminal justice systems in which a court can sentence someone to prison over "willfully" unpaid criminal fees, usually following the order of a judge.[2] For example, in some jurisdictions within the United States, people can be held in contempt of court and jailed after willful non-payment of child support, garnishments, confiscations, fines, or back taxes. Additionally, though properly served civil duties over private debts in nations such as the United States will merely result in a default judgement being rendered in absentia if the defendant willfully declines to appear by law,[3] a substantial number of indigent debtors are legally incarcerated for the crime of failing to appear at civil debt proceedings as ordered by a judge. In this case, the crime is not indigence, but disobeying the judge's order to appear before the court.[4][5][6][7][8] Critics argue that the "willful" terminology is subject to individual mens rea determination by a judge, rather than statute, and that since this presents the potential for judges to incarcerate legitimately indigent individuals, it amounts to a de facto "debtors' prison" system. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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