Penalties for noncriminal fishing violations will run as high as $400.

BOSTON — Poachers will face stiffer penalties later this year after the state adopted new provisions that have raised fishing violation fines as well as made other changes state law.

Noncriminal fishing fines will be doubled in November, along with a number of other changes, after the passage in August of the Environmental Bond Bill.

Noncriminal fishery violations, such as catching an undersized bass, were established about 25 years ago and are akin to a speeding ticket, said Jared Silva, a regulatory and adjudicatory law clerk with the Division of Marine Fisheries.

Poaching a striped bass, a fish that could be worth $100 in its own right, normally carries a $50 fine, Silva said.

“We’re now doubling that,” he said. Noncriminal fines will now run either $100, $200 or $400, with the latter reserved for the most egregious violations. Environmental police officers will also be able to hand out a supplementary $10-per-fish fine on top of the noncriminal fines, a new provision, Silva said.

The raising of the fines comes as state officials try to stymie poaching. Officials heard from fishermen and other stakeholders that the current fines weren’t enough of a deterrent, especially at the Cape Cod Canal.

“There’s always been complaints at public hearings and public meetings,” Silva said. Many people felt that poachers would accept the fines and then continue to poach, chalking it up as “the cost of doing business,” he said.

The new bill, which was largely concerned with addressing climate change, also streamlines or eliminates obsolete fishing violations, some that go back to the 1910s and ’20s.

“We looked at what other states were doing and we were behind the times,” Silva said.

New baseline fines for criminal violations also will be instituted.

The new fines will run from $400 to $10,000; violations can also carry up to 2½-year prison terms.

Mirroring a Department of Environmental Protection statute, the Attorney General’s Office will be allowed to sue for up to $10,000 in a civil suit.

“We’re hoping that there’s greater deterrence moving forward,” Silva said.

This is just one portion that the DMF has gone through to try and put a lid on illegal fishing activity. They have also started to turn more to the adjudicatory hearing process and taking away violators fishing licenses.

“We’ve really, in the past three years, ramped that up,” he said, partially due to the persistent striped bass violations around the canal. “It’s been a successful tool for us.”

In mid-August, during a fish blitz at the Cape Cod Canal, Environmental police handed out numerous court summons and more than 50 citations in one week.

Massachusetts Environmental Police Major Patrick Moran said that week that his officers were “writing violations and seizing fish and gear and it just continues to go on and on with no end in sight.”

Moran said he welcomes the changes.

“I think what we accomplished should serve as a deterrent to violators,” he wrote in an email to the Times. “Prior fines and penalties were looked at as the cost of doing business. We now have the leverage of fining individuals who violate on a per fish basis. Considering some of the overages we have had, that can add up fast and become quite costly.”

Environmental police worked with the DMF for about two years to bring fines “out of the stone age and into the 21st century,” Moran wrote.

“It’s a sad thing when a small percentage of people tarnish the efforts and progress being made by honest recreational and commercial fishers,” he wrote. “I don’t include that small percentage with other fishermen, because they are poachers, plain and simple, that ruin it for everyone else.”