Rick Yencer of the Muncie Star Press has an article about the Muncie City Council’s efforts to impose a $6 traffic ticket surcharge to help pay for police salaries.
For the record, I think it’s a bad idea to inject a profit motive into the machinery of the criminal justice system. People already think traffic tickets are a scam – rumors abound about how officers have ticket quotas and will issue more tickets at the end of the month and so forth. This diminishes our respect for the rule of law. Adding a surcharge may not be as serious as having a private prison industry that profits from greater levels of incarceration, but it’s still not good.
I couldn’t agree more. Legal penalties are supposed to be a deterrant to not commit a crime, but any more they’ve just become a joke. I know that there are financial penalties to getting speeding tickets but there really aren’t criminal penalties, so they are toothless. Once I pay my speeding ticket I go right back to doing what I did before, and what we all do – go the speed we want and not get ticketed but once every few years. It has become a revenue stream for government and that’s all, adding a surcharge to that will just verify what we already know and make traffic tickets further toothless.
As you say: Don’t speed through a town with no obvious source of revenue….