> For the very poor, a short (few days) stint in jail would be far preferable to having your car impounded. This is probably true, but a car impoundment isn't

> For the very poor, a short (few days) stint in jail would be far preferable to having your car impounded. This is probably true, but a car impoundment isn't a first pass at punishment. It would presumably be after someone is a severe repeat offender with no remorse. It's okay to set a maximum punishment, say car impoundment, and then judge from the fact pattern that someone deserves the max punishment. I do hope that the max punishment is less preferable than other hypothetical punishments. > The real problem is that the poor are very often unplugged from civil society as experienced by the middle classes. They don't have a stake in it. Rather than just throw up our hands, if we're serious about the plight of poverty and its ill effects, we should be more proactive. Keep the penalties, because jail time is something everybody understands, no matter how poor you are. But be proactive about not only enforcement but remediation. Send the darned judges to the people rather than making the people come to the judge. If all the person can afford is a quarter, then take the quarter and thank them for their time and their participation. This is a fine take, but is nearly impossible to do wholesale because there are so many entrenched interests. You're talking about a fundamental change (that I agree would be good) to the whole justice system and its goals, which isn't practical in any sense. But in this hypothetical world where the whole justice system is changed, I might agree that jail time is something that could be on the table for speeding tickets. However, that is not going to happen anytime soon, and certainly not all at once. While we ponder how to enact a total overhaul of the justice system, let's make speeding tickets not have jail time as a punishment. > The goal afterall isn't punishment for punishment's sake, it's to heal the wounds to civil society caused by law breaking, repairing the relationship between the offender and the community, and bringing the offender back into the fold. If the offender doesn't have any sense of a personal relationship with the state, then punishment imposed from a distance can't meet even half of its function. Moreover, no penalty whatsoever, or one with no teeth, does absolutely nothing except reinforce the estrangement, which is worse. It's like leaving the mentally ill on the street to rot to death out of some absurd sense of individual liberty; it functions only to make the non-mentally ill feel more secure in their privileged circumstances, rather than addressing any of the real underlying issues. This is super debatable and there are many schools of thought on the goals of punishment. Some say people should be punished for punishment's sake, and indeed the way sentences are handed out in many cases reinforces that this is the prevailing view.