General Road and Highway Discussion

[ijmorlan]

Either way, yes, I agree that a permanent irrevocable license cancellation is in order. If he’s caught driving, ever, 10 years in prison, minimum. Longer if there is any whining about it whatsoever. Enough already.

No, I don’t know how to square what I just said with the idea that we should try not to incarcerate people too much.

I get the sentiment but ten years in prison is absolutely too much - even for bypassing a license restriction. Really so is a permanent license cancellation unless there is additional context to be considered.  One reason we incarcerate people too much is because it’s the hammer we throw at all problems.

License cancellation measured in years - definitely.  Prison sentence measured in months - seems good to me.  Permanent driving restrictions like a speed limited car or additional speed/gps tracking - great.  Escalating prison sentences / consequences for repeat offences / bypassing restrictions - great. 

And so on. 

But people make stupid mistakes and poor decisions and really long prison sentences are rarely the answer to the best way society should deal with it.  Particularly as our technology advances to the point where we have all sorts of better and more targeted punishments / measures.

There are some good points here. That being said, if license revocation/suspension is to mean anything, the penalty for violating the suspension has to be severe. On average, most cars aren’t stopped by police; so on average, one can drive without a license (and without insurance or registration, for that matter) indefinitely. Arguably, I’ve been wasting my money these past 30 years on paying my license renewals. So the penalty needs to be pretty significant.

On the other hand, people who drive fine and never get noticed by police aren’t really the problem …

Also, we’re talking about 100km/h over the limit on road that is not a superhighway. That is criminal negligence, even if by chance they happen not to kill anyone today. I consider an extremely long license suspension (rather than years in prison) to be fairly lenient.

Another possibility would be to have a permanent license suspension, but suspend the suspension after a period of time. Then if they’re caught violating again, un-suspend the suspension. In other words, if they serve a shorter suspension without problem, they can start driving again; but if they prove by their actions that they haven’t learned their lesson, they go back to the more severe punishment.

Society is entitled to force some offenders to change their views and way of life or be locked up for the safety of the rest of us.

Part of the issue is that I don’t think we deal with repeat offenders well at all. Do we really believe the 100km/h over person only did that this one time? What you say really only makes sense if that is the case. If they’re out there every weekend doing this, then they need to be subject to the control of the justice system until they change who they are in a fairly fundamental way. But I see you’re on-board with escalating penalties, so maybe we’re not really that far apart.