When preventing crime stunts moral growth
By Michael Rich
If you’re convicted of drunken driving in the United States, should you want to keep driving, a judge sometimes will require that you install an ignition interlock system in your car. Provide a breath sample and the system determines whether your blood is free of alcohol.
While inconvenient for the driver, the sanction makes sense. Drunken drivers are often recidivists. Mothers Against Drunk Driving estimates that the average drunken driver climbs behind the wheel impaired 80times before he or she is caught. Such convictions, with their accompanying due process, provide a formal indication of the person’s dangerousness that justifies an imposition on liberty.
Rich is an associate professor at the Elon University School of Law.
December 17, 2012 - 6:14 AM
Now may not be the most opportune time to ask about whether “risky conduct that is the price of freedom” should be “allowed”.
I like the idea of DADSS, I consider it to be along with the blind spot and running out of the road sensors, back-up cameras, and other safety upgrades. I do not look at it as a loss of freedom because I think that for many drivers at or just above the legal limit, it is a call they might not be as able to make when not under that influence. It will save lives, it will also save money, employment and keep people out of jails. There is no way to police the “estimate that Americans drive drunk more than 100million times each year” so I see real value in this safety device for us all.
But, of course I am considered an “Authoritarian Socialist Communist Marxist” so what could I know.