In article , Nick
says...
raise the wrote:
On 30 Jun, 14:44, Simon Brooke wrote:
in message , Ace

') wrote:
On Sat, 30 Jun 2007 12:52:44 +0100, Tony Raven
wrote:
Four years for murdering five people with a car while drunk
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/suffolk/6256258.stm
Can't you read English? He's been sentenced to eight and a half years,
which is very near the maximum of 10 that the offence could carry.
What would you have wanted the court to do?
More to the point he's been given a ten year driving ban. Frankly, what I'd
like to see is for the courts to give long *suspended* sentences (up to
and including life sentences) for this sort of thing, but to release the
convicted drivers on licence more or less immediately. They would only be
jailed if they drove a motor vehicle while banned - in which case, being
out on licence, they could be jailed immediately with no need to go back
to court. Towards the end of their sentence they would then have to train
for and sit a mandatory advanced driving test, and unless they passed it
they wouldn't get their driving licence back.

Prison as vengeance doesn't make sense and isn't economic. Prison is only
justified in so far as it either rehabilitates the offender, or protects
the public. If the offender is an irresponsible driver, then in nine cases
out of ten (s)he will rehabilitate in time just be growing older. In the
mean time the public is protected just by preventing them from driving.

They get to continue living their life and earning their living, the
exchequer collects the fine and their continued income tax (and doesn't
have to pay to keep them in prison), and the public are safe. Result, I
would say.

--
(Simon Brooke)http://www.jasmine.org.uk/~simon/
;; If Python is executable pseudocode,
;; then Perl is executable line noise
-- seen on Slashdot.

Exactly where is the punishment here? Other than not being able to
drive an MV (which isn't really a big deal anyway) the driver gets
away with it.


Punishment?

What we are really interested in is preventing the behaviour/crime, both
in the offender and in others. Like Simon I suspect prison has as a
punishment is of very little deterrent value in cases like this.

The logic goes that because people don't expect an accident they don't
consider the penalties and hence even severe penalties have very little
deterrent effect.

It is far more likely that drink drivers do consider the probability of
being caught for drink driving, but without any accident involved and it
is this penalty that they will consider and be deterred by.

The good thing about prolonged driving bans are that they help prevent
recidivism and that they don't cost the tax payer.

Except that banned drivers often continue to drive, repeatedly catching
them and putting them through the courts costs money, supervising their
community service costs money ...