It turns out that at some point you have to pay cash or use a money order to pay a ticket if you are from out of state. And you have to pay on the spot after a certain speed limit is crossed. The officer was happy to impound my car and drive me in handcuffs to a bondsman if needed to get cash but not to follow me to an ATM. Between my wife and I we were able to scrape up the $183 dollars needed to get out of the situation since they did not accept credit cards or checks. I was handed a ticket with a court date on it and it was suggested I drive a little slower, at least until I was out of the state. At that time the officer pointed out a plane in the sky and implied that they would be following us and if we were speeding again that day ( at all ) we'd be taken directly to jail. Or at least I would be because I was driving. I asked if my wife wanted to drive the rest of the way out of the state. She informed me that she had little interest in driving and "might want to try using the cruise control buttons."
I gambled and lost. It cost me about $200 but it turns out that I was willing to pay the price. As it happened, I learned my lesson that day ( for at least the day ) and I consciously chose not to speed until I managed to arrive in Evansville, IN. I only had $17 left in the car. That was in my wife's purse and she made it clear I wasn't going to get that at all if I was speeding. As a mater of fact she now had my wallet in her hand and I wasn't sure I would be allowed to get cash from the ATM either. I was only making 12K a year at that time and a $200 ticket amounted to about all the spending money I thought I might save up for a while. My mental calculus changed on my risk / reward calculation real fast.
To this day I consider the distance from point A to point B and figure out if traveling two miles an hour faster gets me there any faster in practical terms. When I drive to work it takes me an hour or so. That extra couple miles a hour doesn't even buy me enough time to stop at Starbucks for coffee and still get to work at the same time. With the price of speeding tickets going up faster than the price of milk, not to mention the cost of defensive driving classes ( another speeding ticket @ 7 miles over the limit, 5 hours of court time for a mandatory appearance, and wasting away a whole Saturday in class, not to mention that registration for the class and court fees were higher than paying the ticket ) it just doesn't seem to matter as much as it used to to get there any faster.
But onto how this relates to stopping crime...
continued in part 3...