When I read this in Snow Crash, I thought Neal Stephenson was being deliberately absurd. But here we are. Want to go to The Hoosegow LLC and not The Clink, Incorporated? That'll be an extra $50 a night.
You pay for the best jail you can afford. If you are found innocent, your accuser/prosecutor has to reimburse your costs. If you are found guilty, you have to pay restitution to your victims (or their still-living representatives), and the justice service provider handling your case will take whatever measures may be appropriate to protect their subscribers from you after your release. If you can't immediately make restitution, there may be a supervised work program around that will help you finance your jail boarding and court judgments. Or maybe the judge will work out a deal to reduce your weregeld bill, perhaps in exchange for something like submitting to a specific torture, or having a warning tattooed across your forehead.
If you're a really hard case, you just get named outlaw, and someone kills you for the bounty.
For most people, instead of paying taxes to a county, you would pay a subscription fee to a company that provides all-in-one security, dispute resolution, arbitration, rehabilitation, and property and casualty insurance. You might pay $99/month to a reseller agent of Brinks Allstate, and your neighbor might pay $119/month directly to Alfa Pinkertons through their website. If your kid's bike gets stolen, the cop-adjuster comes by to take your report, helps you file your claim, and determines whether it would be cost effective to investigate and prosecute. If they do, and it turns out your neighbor's cousin was operating a bike theft ring out of their garage, the Alfa Pinkertons arrest him, put him in their jail, and provide him with defense counsel. Brinks Allstate and Alfa Pinkerton have a pre-existing extradition agreement in place, engage Wopner-Brown-Scheindlin as their arbitration subcontractor, who in turn sub-subcontracts some jurors from YourPeers. (You might also need to have a separate justice provider through your workplace.)
After the neighbor is found guilty, he has to pay back the cost of reimbursing the bike owners. Perhaps a few of them are willing to buy their stolen bikes back with [a portion of] their insurance money. Until his checks clear, he stays in the Alfa Pinkerton jail's sweatshop, working off that debt at $X/hour. After he's out, he goes right back to being that creepy guy living above your neighbor's garage, and his credit score goes back up with that "RESTITUTION PAID IN FULL" line on his report.
As bad as this all sounds, our actual, real-life criminal control system is in some ways worse.
Part of me wants to be a libertarian/anarchist, but the way their ideas resemble freshman physics explanations that ignore friction and wind resistance really turns me off.
A libertarian world really is a nightmare for the people who believe that the government world does not essentially do exactly the same thing, but with better PR, and maybe different price points. The government version of freshman physics assumes a spherical cow. The libertarian version assumes a spherical pig. The Internet argues about the flavor of the milk.
The truth is that no one will admit there may be warts on their favorite goblin baby until they are growing one right on the end of their pointy little green nose. I have already spent an awful lot of time on the Internet arguing both for and against libertarian ideas. The only good thing that can really be said about the adherents of alternate political views is that at least they recognize that change is only possible if you try something different. You can't really ever predict the outcome of a system when you divorce its ideal workings from the real people who will eventually be running it.
Their families pay $1100/mo to Triple Canopy, which eventually wins its protracted firefight with Blackwater, securing my capture.
The market takes notice. Soon the only protection services in demand are those provided by the company which can wield the most force.
And we're back at government.
I pay $349/mo to Uncle Enzo's Thing, who kidnaps the CEO of Blackwater, cuts off his ear, and douses him in gasoline. My neighbor is a lifetime OG in the local Compton Crips franchise, and the worldwide org takes out 80% of the board of Triple Canopy with simultaneous drive-by shootings. Sachs-Chase-Salomon-ExxonMobil-GE-AT&T-Shinra drops a nuke on all of us. The Lysistrata Society shorts contraceptive stocks. Hydra-TransUnion-NewsCorp merges with SPECTRE-Facebook-Experian and changes the combined corporate motto to "Evil: It Makes Good Money." Real estate prices for secret volcano lairs rise steeply. The King of Tonga sends two war canoes up the Potomac and decisively conquers a barbecue stand in Northern Virginia, forcing it to put pineapple on its pork sandwiches. Cats and dogs, living together--mass hysteria! Chaos!
They say an armed society is a polite society. Mutually assured destruction is a whole lot scarier when you have competitors waiting in the wings to snatch up your dissatisfied customers that want to switch providers because jaw-jaw costs them much less than war-war.
As mentioned in a cousin post, the assumptions embedded in the hypothetical scenarios make the imagined outcomes useless, just like that novice physics student neglecting wind resistance.
There's many ways in which a dystopian automated system of surveillance and justice would be preferable, but society tends to love organizing its own systems of award and punishment.
I was distraught reading that whole thing until the last sentence. You're right- in many ways it is better than our current system. And that's really scary.