On 31 December 2019 I was apparently driving at 37 mph in a 30 mph area in Cambridge, or so a police camera claimed. I didn’t contest this when I received a communication from the police. Instead I paid the requisite fine of £100 by telephone within the prescribed timetable (actually on 27 February 2020). I assumed three points would be appended to my licence electronically. Done and dusted, or so I thought.
On 4 June I received a missive from Peterborough Magistrate’s Court. Apparently I had been required to send my licence to the police at the time I paid the fine. This was presumably an oversight on my part, since I’d assumed that points would be added to my licence electronically. Apparently this oversight constituted a new offence. Nobody between 27 February and 4 June had either reminded me that my licence was required or informed me about an offence outstanding.
My fine of £100 would be returned to my account I was informed; and it was. I was given the option of pleading guilty to this heinous second and new offence or contesting it in court (in all likelihood accumulating additional costs). What to do? Plead guilty obviously. I was also told to send my licence to the court, which I duly did. I had as well to give a full account of my monthly income and expenditure (despite having no intention of putting in for support).
On 5 July I received further correspondence from the court. I now owed £372, comprising a fine of £250, a victim surcharge of £32 and costs amounting to £90. I paid this on 13 July, before the deadline of 17 July. My licence was returned, together with a sentence announcing that it need not have been sent despite my being informed that it had to be. Three points had been added to my licence electronically. This letter was replete with threats of what would happen if I did not pay, including the issuing of a warrant for my arrest and the clamping, removal and sale of my car.
So there you have it. There are a handful of obvious or commonsense observations and queries. Does doing 37 mph in a 30 mph area, plus the genuine oversight of not sending one’s licence, warrant an ultimate fine of £372? Why was my oversight in not initially returning my licence an offence, while the authorities’ failures to remind me, to correspond efficiently, or even to get their instructions right, apparently ok? Why were my personal expenses required when I was making no claim for mitigation? Does the fact of the coronavirus pandemic and lockdown have salience here, because many people in their 70s would have been truly alarmed receiving officious, threatening letters out of the blue while sheilding and feeling vulerable and isolated? What’s really going on here? Is this just an opportunity to raise funds in difficult times?
I can’t resist a few sociological observations too. Weber’s concept of rationalisation or juridifcation, indicating an increasing, seemingly inevitable, bureaucratisation of the state is pertinent. Habermas’ system rationalisation and lifeworld colonisation build on Weber’s (as well as Marx’s) insights. Ritzer’s ‘irrationality of the rational’, cast in similar vein, also comes immediately to mind. And then there’s Foucault’s insistence that bureaucratisation has insinuated itself so deep in the disciplinary society of today that is must be translated into technologies of the self and governmentality. But I want to emphasise a perspective that is implicit in what these perspicacious sociologists had to say, but is not always made explicit.
The critical notion here is that of discretion. How often I have ranted about the contemporary lack of discretion in decision-making! Bureaucratisation is the potent and vanquishing enemy of discretion. It seems that it is no longer possible to override the bureaucracies of the day to forge what used to be lifeworld-informed or commonsense case-by-case judgements. This impacts not only on the police and the courts, but on the probation service, social work, nursing, medicine, teaching and social care. The often well-intended curtailment of discretion via explicit rules often has the unintended consequence of absurd, disproportionate and even unjust decision-making. This is a classic example of Merton’s manifest versus latent functions.
The moral? We must look to lifeworld rationalisation: that is, we must push back and render accountable conventions of communicative decision-making that have been surrendered to system imperatives of money and power that operate strategically.
All this for doing 37 mph in a 30 mph area!