Driving Drunk Again
Repeat Offenders Back on the Streets
By Daniel Muniz

Drunk drivers who are repeat offenders driving on our streets is often a common staple of local media reports. It is outrageous to discover that such serious repeat offenders do not really spend very much time in jail unless they kill someone. And even when their driver’s licenses are revoked, they still manage to end up back behind the wheel.

Although there may be sympathy for someone arrested once or twice while driving under the influence, for the most part, many people would like judges to throw the book at chronic repeat offenders, especially before they end up killing innocent bystanders during one of their drunken stupors. And now in many local municipalities across the country, quite a number of repeat offenders do receive harsh sentences.

But then how do these dangerous drunks get back on the road again?

And even worse, how do they manage to walk out of a jail after spending a brief amount of time even though a judge has thrown the book at them?

As for getting out of jail, the answer lies in practicality and economics.

In the county I live in, a local judge once explained that even if a repeat offender is sent to one year jail term, he will more than likely be out within a few months. Due to massive jail overcrowding, it is fairly easy for a habitual drunk driver to be labeled as a non-violent offender, thus enabling him to serve only a fraction of his sentence.

Compared to the thugs who are murderers, rapists, armed robbers, or violent hoodlums, it becomes a no-brainer to the prison staff on who is going to get released early. This pragmatic view of logistics may suffice for keeping violent criminals locked up but this permissiveness and leniency doesn’t solve society’s problem of the habitual drunk driver getting back on the streets to once again pose a dangerous risk to the rest of us.

As for getting back behind the wheel, it is not too difficult for a repeat offender to find someone to loan him a car.

Consequently, short jail time and the accessibility to vehicles is just a recipe for future disasters.
 

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Due to the way our prison system is set up, long sentences are not an effective. Personally, I am a “lock them up, throw away the key” type of person but I also understand the sober reality of prison overcrowding. For decades, activist groups have made prisons so outrageously expensive that it has become cost prohibitive to lock someone away for an extended amount of time unless he or she is truly a violent criminal.

My home state of Texas has taken aggressive steps in locking up first time offenders for seventy hours.

The hope is that in making the seventy hours a requirement for the first offense, that such a penalty will be enough to scare away most people from doing that again. Consequently, the majority who are responsible enough, the 72 hour rule does the job that is it is supposed to do, especially since most people want to keep their jobs and maintain their family and freedoms. But again, the specter of overcrowding takes precedence. It’s a great law but it is only as strong as its enforcement and execution.

As for dealing with chronic drunks who manage to get behind the wheel again, then perhaps the most interesting idea I have seen focuses on the second most important target which is the car he or she is driving. Whoever gets busted while driving under the influence, then that car gets impounded for 30 days regardless of ownership.

All of a sudden, the generosity of someone loaning out a car now has severe and far reaching repercussions. Naturally, such an initiative won’t completely stop this problem but it will have a dramatic effect in which many people won’t want to take a chance of losing a car for a month, thus they will feel less inclined to loan it out even for a short trip.

And such a deterrent is effective across the board.

It deters the potential first or second time offenders because losing a car for 30 days may be far more painful than spending 72 hours in jail. It is also a big deterrent to anyone loaning out their car to a habitual drunk driver.

Of course there is another more obvious solution that is rarely addressed.

States and big metropolitan areas need to fund and construct low cost “non-violent” jails. Like something reminiscent of the tent cities of the Maricopa County jails in Arizona. Such extreme and Spartan measures are harsh but they can also be maintained at a low cost while housing large numbers of inmates.

It is just too expensive to keep someone who isn’t a hardened criminal incarcerated or to have them placed in the resort-style cupcake jails. The tent cities solve that problem. Such offenders are already a low risk and most just want to get out of jail. They do not warrant the same kind of risk of flight as the vicious convicts do.

The violent thugs need to be locked away for a long time but so do certain types of non-violent offenders.

Not with just drunk drivers, but there are plenty of misdemeanor crimes in which people walk away with nothing more than a slap on the wrist. The way to adequately address the severity of those crimes even though they are not felonies is to ensure that they are locked up for the entire lengths of their sentences.

But again, that is an issue that will rarely be debated until such crimes soar completely out of control.

As for the habitual drunk drivers, it is time for cities to come to grips with the cracks in the system that allow them to flagrantly flout the law.

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