Fines have little effect on curbing bad driver behaviour, and the government crackdown on unpaid fines will simply make a bad situation worse, according to the Dog & Lemon Guide. The largest study of fines (as a deterrent) ever conducted in Australia has shown that higher fines do not reduce the risk of re-offending.
The study, carried out by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research, identified 70,000 NSW persons who received a court-imposed fine for a driving offence between 1998 and 2000. Researchers then followed each offender for a period of five years to see whether they committed another driving offence.
After controlling for a wide range of other factors likely to influence re-offending, the Bureau found no relationship between the magnitude for the fine imposed and the likelihood of a further driving offence.
The same negative result was obtained for drink-drive (PCA) offences, drive while disqualified offences, exceeding the speed limit and ‘other’ driving offences.
For most of these offences the Bureau also found no relationship between the period of license disqualification and the risk of a further driving offence.
For speeding offences, longer disqualification periods actually made the situation worse because it increased the risk that the offender would drive illegally.
Commenting on the findings, the Director of the Bureau, Dr Don Weatherburn, said that they were consistent with a large body of evidence indicating that, contrary to popular opinion, tougher penalties do not reduce the risk of re-offending.
Clive Matthew-Wilson, editor of the car buyers’ Dog & Lemon Guide, said that getting tough on fine defaulters would simply make criminals of people who are often simply messy teenagers.
“The bureaucrats who come up with these schemes are generally white, middle-class and middle-aged. They see life as a series of planned steps and have little idea of how young people and poor people think or act. In a typical case a student will own an old car and the WOF will run out. While he’s sorting that, he gets a ticket. Because he hasn’t got a warrant, he can’t register his car, so he gets a ticket for that as well. Next thing enforcement fees are added. Then the bailiffs are after him.”
“Nothing is gained as a result of this. The money that might have gone to pay for car repairs simply ends up paying for fines.”
“A survey of young people who drove to a Northland training course showed that 92% had no license. 20% of these people couldn’t get a license because they were illiterate. You can’t say these people are simply criminals; they are part of the great messy underbelly of New Zealand culture. You can fine them, but you simply make criminals out of people whose main crime was growing up in a poor area.”
“Doubtless there are boy racers out there who are genuinely criminals and love to flaunt the law, but simply fining them has been shown to be ineffective. It’s time to focus on what works, not on what sounds right to a Wellington bureaucrat.”
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