New York judge Vic­to­ria Graf­feo ruled today that creas­ing a MTA Metro­Card to con­fuse the turn­stile into allow­ing a free ride con­sti­tutes forgery—meaning that, accord­ing to the law, the bend­ing process makes it “falsely altered.”

Now I don’t con­done steal­ing from local tran­sit author­i­ties. (New York’s MTA leads the coun­try with a debt of $25.5 bil­lion, so they need your money.) But what makes more sense: arrest­ing a guy who was observed defraud­ing the MTA of $6 in fares, pros­e­cut­ing him through appeals on a felony forgery charge, and sen­tenc­ing him to 2–4 years in prison; or fix­ing the damn fare col­lec­tion system?

I see that on aver­age states spend $23,000 per year per pris­oner (2001 data). So let’s say that this guy serves the min­i­mum sen­tence and it costs New York $46,000. I don’t really know how much it costs the state to pros­e­cute some­one, but I bet that between lawyers, judges, clerks, and so on, another $40,000 was spent on the case. So we’re at $86,000. (Remem­ber, this guy stole $6.)

Their fare­card sys­tem really needs a re-design to pro­vide even a basic ele­ment of secu­rity, but clos­ing the hole that makes this theft pos­si­ble could be done by tweak­ing the soft­ware. A good engi­neer­ing com­pany could do this for, say, $25,000.

Still look­ing like a sound deci­sion? I think this kind of inside-the-box think­ing is why tran­sit author­i­ties go broke.

On the upside, the judge’s 12-page rul­ing care­fully explains how you can com­mit the forgery your­self and why it works. Awesome.