“What if the offender never pays the fines?
Are the authorities just going to keep asking “pretty please?” in perpetuity? Stupid.”
You act as if there is no middle ground between jail and saying “pretty please”. Well, what if someone owes you money? You cannot send them to jail, so are you left with no other option but saying “pretty please”? Of course not.
What is “stupid” is you pretending that all the normal avenues of debt collection simply don’t exist, in order to justify the government jailing people over nonsense like this.
There are two possible responses to the imposition of a fine: either the fine is paid, or it is not. It might be paid in installments, or the total amount may be reduced, but this is the binary reality. I’m not sure what reality you’re living it.
“Avenues of debt collection” recognize this binary reality: either the fine is collected, or it is not. Are you saying that the state will rely on pestering a party into possibly paying, but if they don’t, then they’ll just give up?