It is a shame, that the law is so often used in America as a hammer to keep the poor, dumb, unorganized, unenlightened, and immature under the thumb of the State. It is absolutely a disgrace that a mere common infraction, such as getting a ticket for speeding can lead to jail time but it can and it does. The first mistake that most people are unaware of is that a traffic violation is a much more serious offence than might be imagined, in fact it is often considered by the State to be a criminal offence, although classified as a petty offence or an infraction which is a special category in which it is classified as neither a misdemeanor or a felony. I suspect that this special classification for an infraction in the criminal code was probably done so that those receiving such traffic violations would not have to own up to having a criminal record, so that when asked by a prospective employer on a job application as to whether: "have you ever been convicted of a crime other than a minor traffic violation," the answer is straightforward. In addition, the other strong hint that a traffic violation is a criminal offence is the fact that should you chose to dispute your ticket; you are allowed to confront and to cross-examine the police officer in a court of law.
All of the foregoing leads up to the very unfortunate aspect of getting a ticket, which is over and beyond the fact that a traffic violation will cost you monetarily in both the infraction cost as well as the increase in your insurance premium, is that the failure of paying such in a timely manner and/or failure to make your court appearance will often lead to a bench warrant being issued for your arrest. The fact that one mere unpaid traffic violation allows any police officer to arrest you for "failure to appear" is one of the most insidious features of the police state that we live in. There are very few people that would welcome being arrested at any time, and there are very few people that would believe that a minor unpaid traffic violation should allow the State to arrest you to begin with, but they can and they do. This again points to the seriousness of an infraction, because that infraction starts the process by which if you do not obey the dictates of the State, you will be subject to incarceration.
Further complicating the manner, a simple unpaid traffic violation, can and often will escalate to a higher fine and penalties for that non-payment, in addition to a bench warrant being issued against you, which can easily morph into additional crimes, such as the very likely suspension of your driver's license, which is a criminal misdemeanor offence, itself subject to fines, penalties, revocation of car insurance, and jail time.
None of this should ever be allowed to occur in a country as rich and as favored as America, but that is the way that it is, and the weight of this justice is unfairly placed on the very citizens that really can't afford to pay the fines and their attendant penalties, to begin with. While it is one thing to pin a traffic violation on a given driver, it is completely unfair, unequal, unjust, and arbitrary to pursue an unpaid fine by leveraging the massive State resources against an individual for a relatively small amount of money and to place that person behind bars.
A lot of this is caused because the police and court forces of so many cities often rely far too heavily upon those very fines to support their institutions and infrastructure, and thereby have a vested interest in seeing that the public is ticketed often and that they pay those fines or suffer dearly for their lack of obeisance.