Drunk Driving Law: an ounce more prevention please.

I'm very glad to see Wisconsin's drunk driving laws continuing to get attention and, it would appear likely, very tight reforms.

There seem to be good things in both the Assembly and the Senate versions. I absolutely think ignition interlocks - those are the breathalyzers that start your car - should be required for all repeat offenders, as the Assembly has proposed. On the other hand, I also am not sure the Assembly version is strong enough on the penalty side, in making it a felony only if it's the fourth offense within five years. Knowing you risk a felony conviction could be a valuable edge on the deterrence side.

This is, of course, assuming deterrence - in which the rational citizen decides the costs of being caught engaging in the crime are too high and too likely to happen compared to the benefits and likelihood of success - is a meaningful theory of crime prevention. In the case of drunk driving, though, rational decisionmaking is often, guess what!, impaired by alcohol. People who are prone to rational thought plan ahead, of course, and find a DD or a friendly futon. And we should encourage that kind of planning ahead. But for various reasons, some people don't plan, and suddenly it's 3 a.m. and it's really not that far a drive, really, and who wants to pay for parking overnight anyway? Etc.

Furthermore, deterrence as Jeremy Bentham first articulated it relies on "swiftness, severity, and certainty" of punishment, or at least the criminal's perception thereof. And really, it's the "certainty" element we need most. A drunk person might have a vague idea of how "okay" they are, but they won't know their BAC. They won't know exactly where they fall, legally, and chances are they'll think they can handle it anyway. You can have a felony on first offense and twenty years of license revocation, but if a person can drive in a straight line, stop as needed, and stay within 5 mph of the speed limit, chances are they'll get home undetected and try it again the next weekend. We all know it happens. Once someone has been caught once, you can identify them as "trouble" and impose all the limits you like. But you have to catch them first.

Given this, I'd be much happier if we were not quite as focused on taking the people we do catch (and catch and catch and catch) and hitting them harder, maybe spending a lot of money on turning them into felons and making it harder for them to have normal, healthy lives when they're done being felons. Where is the discussion on sobriety checkpoints? Here, I'll start - vehicles may have many of the same qualities as a residence, and absolutely are subject to privacy concerns. But when you drive, you are in the public sphere, you are a public danger, and you are part of the reason driving a car is one of the most dangerous things a person can do in the United States. If a police officer wants to talk to you for a minute to make sure you're capable of driving your death machine (you will read my hyperbole and you will like it) home - and this is ALL they do unless it becomes clear that you are in fact incapable - I say the public interest most likely wins.

While this obviously wouldn't catch everyone, it would at least boost the perception that yes, you can get caught, and yeah buster, you had better make plans to crash somewhere until you're safe to drive. Studies of states where sobriety checkpoints are legal suggest that there is a deterrent effect. If the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control is correct in saying it could be up to 20 percent, then Wisconsin might find a great deal of human savings in instituting such measures. There are other things we can do too, of course. Making bartenders and parking facility employees play nanny, for example. But that would just be more intrusive and, probably, less effective.

On another note, I'm very glad to see treatment getting emphasis in both the Senate and Assembly proposals. I'm speaking as someone who at one point years ago picked up her own [older relative, let us call them Z] from a police station because Z was driving drunk. With a minor on board. For the second time in five years. I saw Z, a generally "upstanding" citizen who had never had other brushes with the law, spend two months in jail, go through treatment for alcoholism and depression, and turn their life around completely. It's true that the jail was probably a big part of the wakeup call for Z, but without the resources to support necessary change, a person can easily succumb to despair. In other words, it's not enough to know you're in trouble; you need to know how you can fix it.

Of course, we would all like to assume that people are good and decent and thoughtful enough to make good intoxicated decisions based solely on how many awful things have happened when people have driven drunk. We've all been inundated with the anecdotes, so I won't repeat them, except to say it hit home especially for me last summer when a high school friend got in the wrong car and paid for it with his life. But if that were the case, we'd also be writing laws that force first offenders to paste photos of DUI-related crash victims to their ignitions and dashboards. And that would never work, right? Right?