#559 Musings Beyond the Bunker (Tuesday January 17)
Good morning,
New Year’s Eve (famously referred to by Jimmy Breslin as “amateurs’ night out”) is now safely in the rear view mirror. Whenever I want to say, “I hope everyone got home safely,” it seems a silly comment, since I’m pretty confident no one hearing those words was planning on being unsafe or putting themselves in harm’s way—yet it’s just an expression and it makes us feel good about noting the importance of safety.
I was thinking about the risks caused by drunk driving. I can recall times in my youth (of which I am not proud) when people would suggest that the person most able to hold their liquor should drive. To be fair, this person usually wasn’t inebriated, but likely consumed enough to hit the current legal limit. Fortunately, this generation seems much more careful about drinking and driving. Designated drivers were the norm when our kids were growing up. Now, with the advent of Uber and other ride services, there is even less excuse for driving under the influence. And yet, drunk driving continues to be a problem…
AN INTERESTING IDEA
As most people who have read these Musings for a while know, I’m very much a fan of quick and certain sentencing (accountability) and minimum punishments (retribution rarely changes behaviors). Certainty of consequence seems a great deterrent, while minimal punishment doesn’t destroy lives. Mandy Lowell provided this story of the certainty of punishment for drunk driving. It makes perfect sense:
“After reading today's musings, I recalled hearing in law school from a DA in Boston that the [then recently initiated] practice of speedy delivery of certain, even if brief, jail time for drunk driving, was effective in reducing drunk driving. People found to be drunk driving, I recall being told, were usually given 1-2 days in jail to be served on a weekend…I like the idea of certainty, and timely consequence to violation...
I acknowledge drunk driving is a ‘different’ sort of crime-- so many people have done it and they do not think of it as criminal. It usually occurs without harming someone, and goes ‘undetected’ unless the person is swerving and is pulled over. A larger portion of the population has likely violated that law than, say, motor vehicle theft or assault. ‘Nice' people or ‘people like me’ [rhetorical me, as I have never been drunk] have driven drunk. Jurors do not want to send ‘a person like me’ to jail for a long time, unless someone was hurt. People to not ‘plan’ to be drunk driving; by definition their thought processes are impaired when they do it.
This DA and others in the office agreed that a perpetrators' notion of ‘unlikely consequences’ played a role in frequency of crime. The practice of a brief (and usually on weekend or non-work-day for the defendant so as not to impair ability to work) caused drivers to think more than twice about the likelihood that they would wind up driving drunk. And acquaintances who heard about the jail time would be more concerned about driving drunk…”
PUNISHMENT OR PERFORMANCE
The DA’s idea is, I believe, an excellent one. Is it better that society punish to excess, or that society change behaviors? Certainly, it should be the latter. Any sort of punishment ultimately should be rehabilitative, which is not the focus of our current system. Rather, the victim gains some sort of psychic comfort in retribution and society can seem to itself to have the moral high ground by punishing—and punishing severely. In my mind, the idea that punishment should be based on modifications of behaviors and not simply retribution should be expanded to include various other crimes. Society should benefit through improved circumstances as the result of accountability and change, rather than the current system, which seems to provide little benefit, other than inflicting pain and making some segment of society “feel better” by ostracizing and punishing others for bad decisions. Our criminal justice system is performative and not results driven.
Locking people up as animals, dehumanizing them, and depriving them of the tools and legal ability to pursue a meaningful life after rehabilitation is cruel. With the exception of rape, murder, and wanton disregard for human life (though I could argue this case even in those circumstances), the punishment rarely fits the crime.
REMEMBERING DR. KING THE DAY AFTER
Just because Martin Luther King, Jr. Day was yesterday is not reason to move on from his teachings for another year. Here is a quotation of his that speaks to mutuality and community—concepts that achieved greater meaning and recognition during the global health crisis and that inform efforts to control global climate change:
“May it not be that the problem in the world today is that individuals as well as nations have been overly concerned with the length of life, devoid of its breadth? But there is still something to remind us that we are interdependent, that we are all involved in a single process, that we are all somehow caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. Therefore whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.” —Martin Luther King, Jr., The Measure of a Man, Minneapolis: Fortress Press (1959), p. 45-46
Have a great day,
Glenn
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