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60 days in jail for not paying a $2.75 subway fare costs the city $22,000

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Re: 60 days in jail for not paying a $2.75 subway fare costs the city $22,000

#111

Post by Scoundreller »

geofft wrote: post #96
david38 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not allowed to bring your own? You think this is a good thing? God forbid I make some food at home. Sounds like a protection racket to me or a social equality experiment gone crazy.

I don't think the children are making food at home, and it seems entirely reasonable to prevent rich parents from giving food to their preferred children. If you can't fight generational inequality in a small thing, how can you fight generational inequality in big things like inheritance?

> how can you fight generational inequality in big things like inheritance?

France gets a big fail on this one. It's incredibly difficult to completely dis-own your children in your will.

Re: 60 days in jail for not paying a $2.75 subway fare costs the city $22,000

#113

Post by everdev »

k_sh wrote: post #50
everdev wrote: post #13

I'd imagine the cost of arrests and incarceration are sunk costs though. It's not like we pay the police $2,000 for each arrest, or pay the prison $500/night per inmate. Does anyone know if these numbers were taken by adding up the costs of running a prison and police department and dividing by the number of arrests and inmates? If so, it's a little disingenuous to make this argument. Also, these cases are not about…

> It's not like we pay the police $2,000 for each arrest Not in a direct sense - but civil asset forfeiture and arrest/citation quotas do incentivize individual officers to take actions that benefit their department's budget and their annual review, respectively. > It's not like we [...] pay the prison $500/night per inmate In the case of private prisons (which house 8% of the US prison population[0]), a per-prisoner…

True, but the reference is to Riker's island which is a public prison.

Re: 60 days in jail for not paying a $2.75 subway fare costs the city $22,000

#114

Post by Frqy3 »

delecti wrote: post #19
brianpgordon wrote: post #8

I don't know enough to take a position on this issue one way or another, but I think it should be pointed out that expensive jail time for a few people could serve as a deterrent that results in enough increased fare revenue to offset the cost.

It's generally the case that a significant chance of being caught is a much bigger deterrent than a significant punishment if you are caught. https://nij.gov/five-things/pages/deterrence.aspx

We are moving towards a state where technology will allow us to punish every infraction every time, automatically and at low marginal processing cost. I expect that rebalancing the punishments to match the new likelihood of getting caught will lag by at least 5-10 years, causing greater social problems in the interim.

Re: 60 days in jail for not paying a $2.75 subway fare costs the city $22,000

#115

Post by username90 »

Scoundreller wrote: post #56
addicted wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That assumes people would pay the money otherwise. Which is almost certainly not true. The people who don’t pay likely don’t have the money in the first place or are drunk. It’s unlikely they would have paid any ways.

I like the French system of school lunches. Every student has a card to pay for lunch. The exact price charged is on a sliding scale depending on family income. One child has no idea what the other is charged, it's just a swipe of the card. You're also not allowed to bring your own lunch to eat in the cafeteria, but that system can work out okay when you have dedicated chefs at each school, and cheap good cheese (and…

> I like the French system of school lunches. Every student has a card to pay for lunch. The exact price charged is on a sliding scale depending on family income.

I never really understood the whole "Free if your parents aren't rich" mentality. Parents of rich kids pay more tax so why not give them free lunches as well since they pay for it indirectly anyway? Reduces bureaucracy. We do that in Sweden. The same thing can be said about most things, like higher education, healthcare etc.

Re: 60 days in jail for not paying a $2.75 subway fare costs the city $22,000

#116

Post by m0zg »

jakelazaroff wrote: post #107
m0zg wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or pay the fare. Up to you. I don't see why I should pay somebody else's fare, or, for that matter, the cost of keeping them in jail if they insist that I pay their fare.

You — more generally, society — should pay the cost of keeping them in jail because that's what you (society) arbitrarily decided the punishment would be. It's not like there's some natural law saying fair evasion should result in 40 days in jail. Also, pretty sure life in prison for stealing $2.75 is a violation of the Eighth Amendment.

Nah. The choice between paying $2.75 and ending up in jail for a week is pretty clear even to a most dim-witted individual without an agenda.

Re: 60 days in jail for not paying a $2.75 subway fare costs the city $22,000

#117

Post by arcticbull »

failrate wrote: post #80
kristopolous wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The person who can't afford $2 is now going to pay $50? From where? How?

Have them spend a shift cleaning garbage. Done.

This is the epitome of undercutting good hard-working American jobs. This is why prison labor is so toxic. If it's bad to have illegal aliens sneaking into the country and taking jobs why isn't forcing people into unpaid jobs? The weirdest thing for me is seeing the same people advocate for both.

Re: 60 days in jail for not paying a $2.75 subway fare costs the city $22,000

#118

Post by majewsky »

Scoundreller wrote: post #94
david38 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not allowed to bring your own? You think this is a good thing? God forbid I make some food at home. Sounds like a protection racket to me or a social equality experiment gone crazy.

If the provided lunch is any good, then yes, a good thing. Could some families afford the cost and time of providing a better 2-4 course lunch every day? Sure, but most won’t.

As a child, I had a wide array of food allergies, so doctors put me on a so-called rotation diet. I could only be exposed to certain food items once every 4 days. Day 1 of the cycle allowed wheat and rye, so on the other days, I could not eat any dish with sauce bound with wheat flour. (My family used carob seed flour instead.) Day 2 was potatoes, day 3 was corn, day 4 was rice. (Those were the most significant items. There was more on the diet plan.)

This is why, for the first 4 years of school, I went to a specialized school for physically and mentally disabled children. I was not really disabled (besides allergies and asthma), but that was the only school where the cafeteria personnel was able/willing to accommodate my needs. (My grandmother brought in precooked food for me for the next day when she picked me up from school.) When I changed to secondary school, my parents employed some legal tricks to get me into a school close to my grandmother's apartment, so I could go to her place for lunch.

I realize that I was an edge case. But I sure hope that the laws governing those French kids accommodate their edge cases.

Re: 60 days in jail for not paying a $2.75 subway fare costs the city $22,000

#119

Post by tdy_err »

david38 wrote: post #78
Scoundreller wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the French system of school lunches. Every student has a card to pay for lunch. The exact price charged is on a sliding scale depending on family income. One child has no idea what the other is charged, it's just a swipe of the card. You're also not allowed to bring your own lunch to eat in the cafeteria, but that system can work out okay when you have dedicated chefs at each school, and cheap good cheese (and…

Not allowed to bring your own? You think this is a good thing? God forbid I make some food at home. Sounds like a protection racket to me or a social equality experiment gone crazy.

It's unclear why this is but a quick search will show that children are not required to eat at school at all, so they are free to eat at home or off campus somewhere too.

Re: 60 days in jail for not paying a $2.75 subway fare costs the city $22,000

#120

Post by Scoundreller »

username90 wrote: post #115
Scoundreller wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like the French system of school lunches. Every student has a card to pay for lunch. The exact price charged is on a sliding scale depending on family income. One child has no idea what the other is charged, it's just a swipe of the card. You're also not allowed to bring your own lunch to eat in the cafeteria, but that system can work out okay when you have dedicated chefs at each school, and cheap good cheese (and…

> I like the French system of school lunches. Every student has a card to pay for lunch. The exact price charged is on a sliding scale depending on family income. I never really understood the whole "Free if your parents aren't rich" mentality. Parents of rich kids pay more tax so why not give them free lunches as well since they pay for it indirectly anyway? Reduces bureaucracy. We do that in Sweden. The same thing…

That system would work for school lunches. It would not work as well for an oversubscribed transit system where users may not live where the system is and you want to provide some incentive for people to live where they work, bike, carpool or travel at off-peak times.
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