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Taking away someone's transportation would be a bigger punishment than locking them inside a prison? Prisoners also can't drive cars around, so jail is a strict

Taking away someone's transportation would be a bigger punishment than locking them inside a prison? Prisoners also can't drive cars around, so jail is a strict superset of that punishment. I'm not going to take a hard position on it, but I'm at least mildly skeptical that jail would ever be appropriate for something that can be just as easily solved by progressive fines and revoking a license. Jails in the US are really awful, so they'd need to produce great results for me to prefer putting someone into one of them. And it's not clear to me that they even reduce recidivism rates for crimes of this nature any more than other alternatives. We should be pretty hesitant to send people to prison. Particularly with the knowledge of how calls for increased "tough on crime" policing typically go in America -- well meaning people should keep in mind that advocating for the expansion of carceral laws often results in unintended consequences.

Dylan16807 6y ago
Jail is much more short term than prison. It can easily be a smaller punishment than having to buy a replacement car. Especially if it's something like this, where you might only spend a day or two there and have community service on top.
- namibj 6y ago
  You can have your car back if you fix the headlights. Make it be a mandatory appointment to show up at after e.g. a week and get your car checked for having fixed your headlighs. Also, have a choice of getting your car booted with some electronic boot that you can unlock after sunrise, or getting your car towed. You'll have to show up for the checkup anyways, so that's when you can drop the boot off. Either way, imprisonment won't fix the problem, which is a faulty vehicle. The inconvenience of not being able to drive the car until after sunrise, along with a typical towing/booting fee, should be sufficient incentive to not drive with faulty lights, given how easy they would be for police cars to measure/detect with an inexpensive, small camera unit at a proper location on the police car, which then signals the driver about a suspected violation. Passing a police car that doesn't have anything better to do, while you have your faulty lights on, should be common enough to make driving like that a risk too high.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    > You can have your car back if you fix the headlights. Okay, so now we're talking about a completely different scenario that isn't confiscation. Why am I getting downvoted for that? Jeez.

Dylan16807 6y ago

Jail is much more short term than prison. It can easily be a smaller punishment than having to buy a replacement car. Especially if it's something like this, where you might only spend a day or two there and have community service on top.

namibj 6y ago
You can have your car back if you fix the headlights. Make it be a mandatory appointment to show up at after e.g. a week and get your car checked for having fixed your headlighs. Also, have a choice of getting your car booted with some electronic boot that you can unlock after sunrise, or getting your car towed. You'll have to show up for the checkup anyways, so that's when you can drop the boot off. Either way, imprisonment won't fix the problem, which is a faulty vehicle. The inconvenience of not being able to drive the car until after sunrise, along with a typical towing/booting fee, should be sufficient incentive to not drive with faulty lights, given how easy they would be for police cars to measure/detect with an inexpensive, small camera unit at a proper location on the police car, which then signals the driver about a suspected violation. Passing a police car that doesn't have anything better to do, while you have your faulty lights on, should be common enough to make driving like that a risk too high.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  > You can have your car back if you fix the headlights. Okay, so now we're talking about a completely different scenario that isn't confiscation. Why am I getting downvoted for that? Jeez.