Have you ever been running down an empty stretch of highway in your 1998 Toyota Tercel, enjoying the wind in your face (because the window doesn’t roll all the way up anymore), hearing the rumble of the exhaust (because the exhaust manifold is leaking), and finally, turning around to look behind you (because the mirror is hanging on by a thread) to see a police cruiser lighting you up?
Then, when trying to pay the ticket, you realize that speeding in 2023 costs the equivalent of two weeks worth of groceries. You’re left with a choice; pay the ticket, or eat real food until November? Such is the struggle of the working class when fines are levied against them.
Let’s take a look at higher income earners when compared to low earners when charged a $286 fine.
The low earner, at $15 an hour, would require 19.1 hours of labor to pay that fine (before taxes!!!), whereas a professional making $60 an hour would require just 4.8 hours of labor to pay off that fine (Pettit, 2022). This is also ignoring the fact that lower paying jobs also happen to be the ones which are the most tiring and physically taxing.
I believe that it is necessary to have a system similar to the one that already exists in Europe and a lot of Latin American countries, which has a sliding scale of penalties based on your income-level and severity of the offense (Pettit, 2022).
I also believe that nonpayment or failure to appear should have a maximum level of punishment; for example, the government should not have the ability to jail someone for not paying a speeding ticket. Rather, they should use other means, such as wage garnishment, to retrieve fines that are unpaid (but only if they do so in a progressive manner accounting for the person’s income level).
Sources:
Bing, L., Pettit, B., & Slavinski, I. (2022). Incomparable Punishments: How Economic Inequality Contributes to the Disparate Impact of Legal Fines and Fees. The Russell Sage Foundation journal of the social sciences : RSF, 8(2), 118–136. https://doi.org/10.7758/rsf.2022.8.2.06