Michigan has a programs that impose fees above and beyond the initial fines for repeat offenders. Drivers who amass seven points in two years are assessed a $100 fee each year and an extra $50 for any points accumulated above that.
The higher the fees, the more people simply don’t pay.
Michigan reports a collection rate of only around 50 %.
California figures it faces $10 billion in uncollected fines.
In California the increasingly limited access to the overcrowded courts to get problems sorted out have produced more than 4 million license suspensions in the past eight years.
Traffic-ticket abuse, high surcharges, and a confounding wall of bureaucracy were cited in an investigation by the Justice Department of police practices in riot-torn Ferguson, Missouri.
There, in 2013 alone, a city of 21,000 issued 33,000 arrest warrants for unpaid traffic tickets and other minor offenses
Ferguson has that revenue earmarked for 21 percent of the city’s operating budget. Civil libertarians suing the city say Ferguson has effectively created a debtors’ prison system that jails those unable to pay the jacked-up fines while rewarding private debt-collection companies with copious profit.
http://www.caranddriver.com/columns/traffic-tickets-have-become-a-tax-hack-pile-on-column
The higher the fees, the more people simply don’t pay.
Michigan reports a collection rate of only around 50 %.
California figures it faces $10 billion in uncollected fines.
In California the increasingly limited access to the overcrowded courts to get problems sorted out have produced more than 4 million license suspensions in the past eight years.
Traffic-ticket abuse, high surcharges, and a confounding wall of bureaucracy were cited in an investigation by the Justice Department of police practices in riot-torn Ferguson, Missouri.
There, in 2013 alone, a city of 21,000 issued 33,000 arrest warrants for unpaid traffic tickets and other minor offenses
Ferguson has that revenue earmarked for 21 percent of the city’s operating budget. Civil libertarians suing the city say Ferguson has effectively created a debtors’ prison system that jails those unable to pay the jacked-up fines while rewarding private debt-collection companies with copious profit.
http://www.caranddriver.com/columns/traffic-tickets-have-become-a-tax-hack-pile-on-column
