Intermittent reinforcement is the most effective form of operant conditioning. Unpredictable punishments in a wide gray area will make people stay well clear of even the shallow end of that gray area.
You make a great argument, and I've been thinking about it, because I know intermittent reinforcement/operant conditioning has extremely strong evidence in its favor. A HN comment from today[1] brought the problem to my mind again, but this time with a possible solution.
At their roots, operant conditioning and classical conditioning are both learning mechanisms. Since the time of operant conditioning, spaced repetition[2] has gained a lot of popularity. It's a further refinement that depends on beginning with short intervals, and proceeding to longer ones.
The idea this suggests to me is that speeding tickets happen to many people infrequently enough that the enhanced learning never takes place. Draconian crackdowns, however, happen frequently and with high salience because of media coverage--the only time you know about someone else getting a speeding ticket is when you see them pulled over, and it's hard to feel as personally involved with that as when you hear all the details of someone's arrest and imprisonment on the news.
One piece of evidence for media coverage changing behavior is that people buy lottery tickets; because they've seen lottery winners on the news, the probability of winning has a much higher salience than it deserves.
This is exactly the line of reasoning I wanted to suggest; operant conditioning, as with all forms of learning, has nonlinear results below a certain threshold of involvement. We're not good at expectation values, especially in these cases:
1. Rare events, like receiving a speeding ticket, are relatively underweighted. Every time you drive without receiving a ticket reinforces speeding behavior.
2. Extremely salient events, like winning the lottery, tend to be overweighted--possibly because they're so important to our cognition, and we tell ourselves plausible stories about winning.
There's also a difference between negative and positive reinforcement and punishment. Receiving a speeding ticket is positive punishment; the lottery is positive reinforcement. Couple that with differential media coverage, like you mentioned, and you get significantly different behavior.
They don't 'disappear' you or send you to the torture chamber for going over the speed limit. They do send you away for speaking out against the leader.
