“Have to” is an ambiguous concept. It could mean they go to jail if they don’t. It could mean all their meager assets and wages are confiscated and they’re homeless forever. It could mean they only really pay you back if they win the lottery. It could mean nothing but they “owe it to you” on an abstract balance sheet somewhere.
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I was responding more to your back-and-forth with @orenwolf above, but sure. If you’ve only got liability insurance, then you’ve pretty much signed up for your vehicle being disposable. It makes sense for a lot of people (as you point out) if you (wisely) don’t have an expensive car. You’ve already done the math on it and the car is worth less than x many terms of full insurance costs.
Again, you seem to want someone convicted of a crime to pay with jail time and with money. Pick one.
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Those are two disparate things. The jail time covers society’s interests, reimbursement covers the interests of the individual directly wronged.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills here. I 100% do not think that people should be imprisioned for debts. But if you go up to a dude on the street and smash his iPhone, you should absolutely have to buy him a new iPhone.
Sure. I would agree. Is the iPhone Smashing Bandit more likely to be able to pay you back from prison, or while free to work?
I would disagree that your interest is separate from society’s. If you’re owed restitution for your loss, then you should receive it - but that’s the punishment. If it’s more important that the person who damaged your property go to jail, then great. But don’t expect reimbursement.
Then again, I have a big problem with how our society handles property crime. It seems like people are punished more for stealing or damaging property than they are for hurting or killing people.
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Eesh, I don’t know about that idea of reimbursement alone being sufficient.
It’s a bit of a reductive argument, but in that world what’s the difference between buying a product in a store, and stealing it from someone (but leaving behind an envelope containing its cash value)?
I would strongly prefer the latter not to happen, so I want there to be an additional consequence to help dissuade.
Okay, but the point is… what if they can’t? We’ve ruled out putting them in prison for not being able to pay you back. Do we garnish their wages? What happens when that leads to a situation where they’re homeless? I’m going to assume that’s not a fit punishment for poverty either. Do you garnish their wages only down to an acceptable minimum income? Leaving aside the issues with calculating that, what if this means you get a dollar a month? Or nothing at all for as long as they earn under the minimum? That doesn’t help you replace your damaged property, and they may never pay you back.
It’s all well and good to say someone should have to pay you back, but without a viable means to enforce that, it doesn’t mean anything.
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This is what I was going at in my intitial post in this thread — I just don’t know what to do.
I’d lean towards garnishment, I think, because a criminal should be able to go on with their life after serving their sentence, but especially with very expensive crimes, it might be literally impossible to strike a realistic balance that allows them to move on while still making ammends.
I mean, the big picture solution is to eliminate poverty. In the meantime, maybe we need to worry less about punishment and more about rehabilitation, and making victims whole.
Going back to the article Cory cited, most of the examples aren’t where a victim is being reimbursed by the person who did the damage. They are examples where minors are being re-jailed or left homeless due to failure to repay an insurance company. How is that even a thing?
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I think the problem I have with this isn’t so much about garnishment per se - I mean, how many parents ask their kids to pay back a neighbour when their sportsball breaks their window? - but instead around abuse - Copyright act says you owe $250,000 per infringement to folks for copying, so there’s only a small set of steps to lead to the government or civil orgs charging exorbitant fines for “damages” and requiring folks to work it off - or go to prison.
And sure, you can craft legislation that makes those distinctions, but history has shown that we (collectively) are really bad at considering all use cases and eventualities for such.
I guess the way I look at it is: Someone breaks your iPhone, they go to jail and have to pay you back. If they can’t pay you back, they have to declare bankruptcy and have seven years of terrible credit. That seems like a “fair” outcome to me, and doesn’t involve indentured service or confinement (for the restitution component, anyway).
non-dischargeable debt is the slippery slope that leads to generational indebtedness and all sorts of dystopic hells.
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This is exactly what my earlier post was about, how to keep you from having to pay for someone else stealing from you while not imprisoning them for not being able to.
I only see 2 possibilities. 1) The perpetrator of the property crime is found, convicted, and able to pay the damages. 2) There is some sort of system where insurance covers the damages. Since the first is rarely possible, I was saying we need to improve the way we handle the second
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The problem with garnishment is that poor people often have families. Is it fair to reduce the quality of life that a person can provide to their children because they committed a crime? That seems to be punishing the children for a crime by the parents. Since poverty has a significant impact on crime, you’re essentially using poverty as a cudgel to punish people for already being poor.
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yeah good luck with that, Disney
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Well, you could take your philosophy a step further and straight up separate the punishment/rehabilitation aspect from the financial restitution.
So, the criminal goes to prison or whatever for the theft in the criminal system and is also subject to a civil law order to pay you/your insurer damages.
Why should the criminal law system deal with your purely financial loss? Let the civil system deal with that, that’s what it’s there for.
So, no one goes to prison for not paying you back, their debt to you is handled under civil law and you have all the usual civil law methods for trying to get the money off them.
Which, yes, in a reasonable society should include some method for ensuring that no one has to pay out money they don’t have. Lots of scope for different solutions to that, all unsatisfactory in some way or another.
Presumably because the insurers have paid out to the victim/on their behalf and the victim has transferred their right to restitution to the insurance company. Fairly standard practice.
It’s what lets insurance companies deal with your car accident without you needing to bring proceedings, etc.
It’s not unreasonable for an insurance company to try to recover monies from the person causing the insurance event where they can. Just because they take a premium for the insurance doesn’t change that.
The premium is calculated to take into account the possibility of being able to get money back from the person causing the damage/harm in some proportion of cases.
Sure, we could say they can’t do that in these sort of cases but that should be on the basis that we don’t think it’s right for person causing the harm to suffer excessively rather than that there is something inherently wrong in an insurance company trying to recover monies they laid out for their insured where there is a ‘guilty’ party who would otherwise be responsible for the damage.
I get that, I’m just highly skeptical that insurance companies factor in recovered losses in their premiums. Full disclosure: I definitely have a chip on my shoulder, having just recently dealt with an insurance company that lied, dragged it’s feet, lied some more, tried to intimidate me, did more foot dragging, etc.
I get periodic premium increases for supposed “increased property crime” in my area. Funny, I can’t find any reference in public databases to these increases, and in general, crime rates have gone down over time. Premiums do not. Insurance premiums never go down, unless you switch providers to one that’s hungry for your business (so that they can gradually jack up your premiums).
So I will lay out the hypothesis that insurance companies gladly double-dip, increasing premiums and recovering losses, whistling the whole time.
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Oh sure. I assume the same thing.
This.
If I shop around I can get ‘new customer’ benefits on insurance that mean I pay less than £10 for a years insurance. There are more hardcore types who’ve even managed to get paid for taking out insurance.
Yet telephone your provider and tell them you want to switch and they won’t even offer you the same level of incentive they are offering new customers.
Of course this is true for all businesses these days.
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