PS3 Skyrim always freezing when I pay bounty

I've been having this problem for the past month on my Skyrim game for PS3, I've been trying numerous ways to fix it on and off for at least a month, but nothing seems to be working, so I'm coming here as a last resort or else I might need to sell my Skyrim
The game freezes when I try to go to jail or pay my bounty whenever a guard tries to arrest me. Choosing the fighting option does not freeze the game, yet these two do. I would just avoid talking to guards, but my bounties is Solitude, Markarth and Riften are so high that the guards talk to me as soon as they see me.
I can't do anything anymore except for walk around the wilderness of skyrim, I can't enter nearly any town or city

Any help would be appreciated.
I'm also on PS3, so console commands won't help.

Only a thought, but I remember being approached by a bounty hunter a couple of times. Apparently, if you have a high bounty for a long period of time, and you aren't seen by the guards in the hold, they will eventually send out a bounty hunter. I don't know if it happens every time, but it happened to me at least twice. I was approached randomly in the wild, and in one case I wasn't even in the same hold in which the bounty was held. So.... Maybe by waiting for a few days in the wild you might be lucky. More risky, you could go into the holds with large bounties and make them larger, as this might increase the chances of a bounty hunter being sent. As I said, only thoughts. And hardly a guaranteed fix, but I hope it may be of some help!

FYI - you need to pay the bounty hunter there and then - don't attack him, or exit dialogue without paying (causing him to attack you)!! If you pay him, he will go away and your bounty will be cleared with no need to return to the hold/go to jail etc...

Bizarre. Was it new or pre-owned? I don't know if that would have anything to do with it. I had the same issues on my Xbox when I transferred the gamesave from the hard drive to an external. The same could be said for transferring to a flash drive as well. If it's new and it's on the hard drive, and the patches have been dowloaded (which doesn't really mean a whole lot), I would think (just a guess) that it could be the disk or the console. But if your not having any problems with other games on your console then I would guess maybe the disk. You could try swapping out disks. When I ran into problems when I first got the game, I called Bethesda Tech Support. They were very helpful, so you may want to think about that too.

Thanks to both answers, I'll be sure to try both suggestions.

And it was new and not pre-owned. Another thing I noticed just this morning is that it only happens with a few of my saved games, I started a new game just to do the start again and when I got arrested it did not freeze on me, it only seems to be affecting games that I've had for awhile, so maybe I need to just start a new game.

Now it is starting to sound like maybe it could be the console reading the discs. I may be wrong. But I've had the same problem on the 360. I went to gamestop and bought the 360 disc lens cleaner for about $15 and it cleared it up. Surely there is is one for the PS3. I haven't checked. That might be it.