I think the real objection here is people being allowed to pay 1000s to get out of fraud charges, not paying £150 becuse they got caught doing low level evasion that would cost the public purse far more to prosecute.
My objections are to both.
Allowing someone to buy their way out of a £43,000 fraud charge is morally and ethically wrong.
Allowing TOCs to charge exorbitant, arbritrary, and wholly unjustifiable fees just because they can is equally morally and ethically wrong. And, actually, I'd say that engaging the SJIP for such trivial amounts is an abuse of the courts.
In any other setting a £2 matter wouldn't be prosecuted as it wouldn't be in the public interest to do so, and I struggle to see why the railways should be anything special. It is worth noting that the fare evasion in the case that sparked this thread was about £3.
I also firmly believe that the Penalty Fare system exists for a reason- and the penalty element of that has only just been increased to £50/£100.
If people were honest you'd not need gatelines. It'd be enough for guards just to do it (in non DOO areas) between safety related duties. Indeed that's how it basically was outside London in the 90s.
Back in the 90s the friendly guard would walk down the train and sell you a ticket from his little hand-held machine. He'd get a bit of commission, the railway got their revenue, you'd get your ticket, happy days for all. And- here's the thing- people would be less able to 'forget' their railcard or 'accidentally' buy a child ticket, because the guard would query it when he was selling you the ticket.
Maybe I'm just showing my age, but automation has actively encouraged the current attitude to fare evasion to flourish. Instead of buying your ticket from a person, you buy it from a machine. Instead of having your ticket checked by a person, it is checked by a machine. The biggest disincentive to low-level evasion has always been having to look someone in the eye to do it. Instead we have machines everywhere. Doughnutting is rampant now because you'll be checked by a machine at each end of your journey but you'll never normally interact with a real person during your journey. It's the same in the shops, where all the tills are automated yet the shops are amazed- AMAZED- that people ring a bag of expensive formula milk through as a potato.
But if you try and buy a ticket on the train now then, apparently, you're an evil dishonest fare evader and you deserve to be extorted. I'll be honest- I'm not buying it.