Perhaps because it sounds like blood money. Which has the unfortunate affect of being useful for those with wealth to avoid punishment, but useless for those without, who will still end up in prison.
Per the article, most of the money wasn't used for restitution, and many individuals are arrested for merely not paying fines and fees, no restitution given.
It does not deter crimes, and it makes life harder for those who were effectively jailed for being poor (eg, jailed because unable to afford a traffic fine), those who have turned their life around, and more.
We know that rich people aren't effectively ostracized despite a widely published legal history, as convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein demonstrated.
In case my wording wasn't clear enough: level of deterrent obviously shouldn't depend on your income, which this system roughly achieves. (Doesn't totally achieve it: a poor person can't in truth afford to lose any of their income, while a rich one could easily temporarily let go of over 90% without it affecting anything; for that I don't see an easy fix.)
As said, I can't imagine a moral justification for not implementing some similar scheme.
Because a rich person can steal 50m and get penalized the same way someone like us would when stealing a paltry sum. Though my comment also implies the rich can easily drag out their court case and afford an army of representation so they don't have to deal with whatever sentence they are getting. Even though the sentence itself is a sham because stealing 50m dollars being punished the same as stealing 5k is obviously a sham.
They're wealthy compared to the perpetrators of the crime. If the 'victims' understood the value of their money, then they would never give it to anyone over the phone even if threatened with jail.
If someone wants to take my money, they'd probably have to pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
Didn’t you answer your own question here? Criminals paying money to reduce the penalties from their crimes seems like a net negative for society, even if it helps charity.
Yes. To be fair all low value financial punishments are ethically reprehensible on this ground. They don’t dissuade anyone with money because the consequences are low or easy to appeal and people who are poor are punished harder. This ends up in a situation where punishment causes an even larger cultural divide or pushes people to other crime to make ends meet.
It's almost as if the law is setup to let people make bad choices with money they don't actually have so that some value can be extracted from them later.
I think part of it's because when a poor person looks vaguely associated with a crime, it's straight to jail. When it's a rich person it's all "well IDK we just can't be sure, can we?"
When someone steals your cash and makes you go to court to beg for it back, I think that might make a significant difference in your rich/poor status, huh?
Perhaps you can finish that thought with some compassion, and agree that this is a stupid system?
By that logic, people don’t commit murder or steal because prison is undesirable. I’d like to think that there’s other motives than just 50 bucks for chargebacks (which, as far as I know, can be negotiated with payment providers anyway..)
Basically, all the people talking about its just the downtrodden trying to get by are trying to score political points, when the core issue is that the repeat criminals are not) insufficiently disincentivized.
15 percent might be a sizable sum, but its clearly not the core problem here.
It's odd how the same people who are prone to excuse criminals on the basis of the criminal's poverty, so frequently accuse rich people of having obtained their wealth through illicit means.
Especially when the people forfeiting your money are also the one criminalizing the drugs that the random criminal needs to rob your house to be able to afford, lacking any support for their conditions elsewhere because that money is put into police budgets instead.
(It's also worthwhile in discussions about "crime" to remember that it's a very loaded term. For example, wage theft numbers absolutely eclipse burglary, yet those are rarely what we think about when we hear "crime")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_money_(restitution)
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