On the slow track to justice

A week or so ago I was on a train from New York to Princeton. Somewhere before Linden I heard a bit of a hubbub around me and something about "all for $1.75".

It seems that a young man was trying to get a free ride by sneaking on at one station and sneaking off again at the next station, before the conductor came by to collect tickets. Unfortunately for him, the conductor came by a little too soon. And still more unfortunately for him, it seems that this wasn't the first time he was caught in this behavior. It was his third strike.

The conductor, only slightly older than the culprit, gleefully radioed for reinforcements. So along came the older head conductor, as well as a third conductor to join in the sport. They needled him for a while, and finally, not knowing how else to extract any satisfaction from him, radioed for the police to pick him up at Linden.

The train pulled in to Linden. And waited for the police to arrive. For about 20 minutes. And then waited for the police to debrief the conductors for about 10 minutes. During which time no one was allowed on or off the train, including passengers who just wanted to get off at Linden. Luckily I was in no particular rush, but there were a number of fairly antsy people around.

During all this waiting, I had some leisure to reflect on the incident.

The predominating question in my mind was: who stood to benefit from this exercise in justice? Why was so much collective time allowed to be spent on addressing such a petty "crime"?

Consider how much time was involved: at least one trainful of people, containing possibly hundreds of passengers, was delayed for half an hour, and who knows how many other trains with how many other passengers were held up behind ours? In addition, no fewer than three police officers appeared on the scene to interrogate the dangerous fare-jumper, diverted from protecting the citizens of Linden from other dangers. Who knows what the delays may have cost the passengers, in terms of lost opportunities, irritation to their customers or colleagues or families? Had I been on my way to, say, a job interview, I would undoubtedly have been frantic at the delay. To be fair, I think that the conductors, had they known that the process would be so slow, would have contented themselves with throwing the guy off the train at Linden with a couple of savory curses.

What was the value in spending all this time to punish a $1.75 crime? At the time, it felt like the purpose of the exercise, in the minds of the conductors, was to demonstrate to the world that they were there to uphold the social contract. It wouldn't be fair, after all, to the law-abiding, paying passengers to let some thief off scot-free. And besides, they weren't going to let some dumb-ass criminal make a monkey of them. Probably there were a few people on the train who felt the same way. But I think the majority of the law-abiding, paying passengers on that train would have cheerfully allowed the social contract to be broken in this instance, if only to get to where they were going on time. Clearly there's more at stake than $1.75, but it's not clear to me how much. Is fare-jumping a major revenue-loss for the the trains? I don't know. But it would have to be a pretty significant one, to make a delay like that worthwhile. No one from NJ Transit bothered to share that information with us.

It's a common theme in security: you don't spend more on protecting something than that thing is worth.