According to
The Daily News, from 2008 to 2013,
fare-beating arrests have increased from 14,681 to 24,747. Don't worry, they are expected to get higher this year!
37,500 people have gotten sentences for the $2.50 crime that involved incarceration, including time-served, and 1,802 of those people were minors
What's the reason for this? The managing director at Bronx Defenders, Justine Olderman (whose office has defended thousands of these cases) says:
The NYPD trots out this justification that they’re arresting people for minor infractions as a way of keeping violent crime down, and yet there is no evidence to show that there’s any correlation between turnstile jumping and violence [...]
Our clients charged with theft of services are predominately young, people of color, from under-resourced communities. The reason [for turnstile jumping] is always the same, poverty.
The statistics are amazing. Read the rest here.