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To: R.W.Ratikal
The main reason why that wouldn't work is that the level of deterrent effect of a law is directly proportional to the perceived risk of getting caught. Something like 67% of all murders result in an arrest. What percentage of "pot smokings" do you think result in an arrest? It has to be one in several thousand. The risk of getting caught for crimes where there are actual victims each time the law is broken is much higher than the risk of getting caught using drugs. Drug users tend to think that as long as they are just a little careful they'll never get caught, and for the most part that's a pretty reasonable assessment of the situation. Most won't ever get caught, and most are young and feeling invincible anyway when they start messing with drugs, making it even less likely they'll worry too much about the remote possibility that they'll get caught.

Another problem is that you are advocating ridiculously high fines that will never be paid by the small percentage of users who do get caught. I work in the criminal justice system. The higher the fines the less likely they'll ever be paid. My county and city actually spend a lot of money trying to collect fines, as does the state, when you factor in all the people sent to prison for not paying their fines, not to mention state services to their children when they are away. Most people don't have the funds to pay even a few hundred dollars up front, and then they are always missing payments and the prosecutors have to get warrants and get these people picked up on contempt charges or petitions to revoke probation or suspended sentences. They have to find these people and rearrest them, often over and over again. More often than you would think it takes years and years and lots of effort to just to collect a few hundred bucks from someone.

Our fines aren't that high around here but a substantial portion of are criminal dockets are taken up by what are basically fine collection hearings, and we end up putting a lot of people in jail and prison for not paying. Fines as high as you are advocating are exceedingly rare, but when they are handed out they are rarely ever paid in full, even after years and years of efforts to get them paid. In most cases though the only people who ever get super high fines like that are folks with lots of money who basically buy their way out of trouble by agreeing to pay a huge fine up front in exchange for no prison time and a conviction they'll be able to get off their records, or they'll just pay a large sum as an "asset forfeiture" and either plead to severely reduced charges or in some cases get their charges dropped altogether. But people like that only account for a tiny fraction of the people arrested.

For various reasons, most people arrested don't have much money. Around here at least about eighty percent of those arrested qualify for public defenders, and if you just looked at drug offenders the percentage would be higher, and I know the numbers are similar most everywhere else. These people, especially those really into drugs, would never be able to pay the kind of fines you propose. We'd spend more money trying to cloect them than we'd ever collect.
37 posted on 06/20/2006 3:36:03 PM PDT by TKDietz
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To: TKDietz

cloect = collect


38 posted on 06/20/2006 3:36:44 PM PDT by TKDietz
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