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Depending on the reason, anything from additional fines, commuting the sentence to community service, or perhaps jail.

There's a big difference between someone not paying a fine because their flat-out broke and not paying it because "fuck the system, I'm above the law."

Zero-Tolerance and One-Size-Fits-All policies are destructively stupid and result in bad outcomes. Context matters in a system of jurisprudence, but ignoring it makes the lives of those implementing and managing them easier though, which is probably the point.




>or perhaps jail

No. There should never be jail for debt. We have a lot of history seeing what debtors prison looks like and it's ugly, and also stupid because it's the government paying out a lot of money... to collect a bit of money? Usually paying out far more then the fine is anyway. Plus opportunity cost. Plus any value lost to society from whatever that person might have done outside of prison. Plus any extra cost that comes from them getting turned far worse while in prison. If someone has zero money, and will never in the future have any money, then sure blood can't be squeezed from stone and it's still better to write it off (or change the statute to require different recompense like service if it's deemed that important) than jail them. If they do have any money/property, or ever will collect any money/property down the road, that can be taken in due course.


The purpose of fines is to punish someone, not to raise money (except in failed and failing states, of course). Jailing someone who can't or won't pay as a replacement punishment is just common sense.




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