Ideally, you're supposed to avoid high court fees & fines by not doing criminal things. Avoid the court system and you will never have to pay court fees. And if you do end up with a $50K judgment, you're supposed to go work productively and convince someone to pay you $50K for work that's worth more to them than $50K. Thus you have paid your debt to society - you did something bad, but if you do other good things that people find valuable, that debt is wiped out. In theory at least, someone with $50K in his pocket got it by doing things that a lot of people found valuable, enough that they were willing to pay $50K for it.
Now, I know it doesn't always work that way. Someone could find themselves in the court system not because they did something bad, but because they're black and were standing on the wrong street corner. We shouldn't do that. And sometimes whole behaviors that are normal in one disadvantaged culture (smoking weed, for example) get criminalized precisely because the person in power wants to jail lots of people. The person who did that should've been put in jail himself, but Gerald Ford pardoned him. This is also contingent upon people having money because they did things of value that other people found worthwhile enough to pay them for, which also isn't a given today. We should fix that too, although I think that a lot of people's reaction against wealth is because they can't wrap their heads around how many people a billion users is or how much value they derive from everyday activities provided by a large corporation.
But assuming that things are broken but we're going to slap a band-aid on the one specific instance that's in front of us today risks entrenching the brokenness. Say that you do create lower fees and fines for poorer people. Aren't you now incentivizing criminal behavior, as the costs for it are less? And won't those societal costs be born primarily by the people around them, who are usually other poor people that now have to live with the consequences?
I generally agree that at the lower bound there the cascading effect of penalties can be disproportionate and extreme, things like ending cash bail can be a way to improve this (though I'm not a policy expert). Making it similarly extreme for everyone seems bad? It also creates a disincentive for making money which seems like the opposite of what you want.
1) keep the current system (fixed fines) 2) proportional fines (higher fines for wealthier violators) 3) abandon penalty fines entirely for another system
For most cases I'd like to see #3, since I think fines are basically a bad system of social control. However, there are going to be cases where we want to keep fines there - and for those cases #1 continues to enforce class structures, while #2 applies pressure evenly across class.
Also, sorry, I don't accept that last point. Nobody is going to stop making money because their parking tickets go up in cost. That's not how people work.
I'd be partial to keep fines, but protect the lower bound from cascading failure.
> "Nobody is going to stop making money because their parking tickets go up in cost. That's not how people work."
There is evidence already of incentives changing behavior with the recent stimulus. I think it is how people work.
Let me ask you this. What if fines are what dividing people into castes? The fees around court and jail in the US are a great example of this. If you get sent to jail or taken to court for any kind of infraction, the fees around it can cripple you financially for YEARS. Tho if you have a spare 50k laying around you can make them all go away. I think there are many cases outside of the criminal legal system where this is also real.