Breaking A Single Ticket Essay

If a single ticket took your entire life away, how would you feel? Would you be angry or maybe you’d be crying your life away? Either way, imagine having a ticket that’s $240 dollars that after 5 months turns into $800 maybe even a $1,000-dollar ticket. Believe it or not, but this is something that happens almost every day to any random person. Our lives as we know it may controlled by a simple ticket. With this in mind, I want to discuss how corrections systems, crime, sanctions, social order, explicit rules and even impersonality plays into effect when a ticket is given to someone who’s “broken” a law.

To start off with what a corrections system is, it’s basically like probation. You are watched and expected to meet up to the standards of whatever you’ve been convicted of; in this case you’re meeting you ticket payments. As explained in John Oliver’s, Municipal Violations rant, people with tickets are put on probation, and even given

In Tom Barret’s case, he ended up in jail three times for stealing a $2 dollar can of beer, and not paying the ticket for his action on time. As outrageous as it may seem, to the court that’s a very serious offense. Meaning that his actions were most likely labeled under “violent crime”, which would mean he’d have to be “using force” or “proposing some kind of threat”. Which he wasn’t, but obviously it was so serious that he had to be arrested multiple times for it. Like Tom Barret’s incident, Harriet Cleveland lost practically everything due to owing a ticket. In result to that she met social order standards and based her whole life on arranging ways to try and pay off her fine. Which to me is utterly ridiculous because these “explicit rules” do not outline any standards in our bureaucracy. Better yet these rules and sanctions provoke tons of impersonality’s that don’t even consider a person’s situation when tickets are given