Contrarian: The Thin Booze Line

Do the worst drunk drivers go unpunished because they have so much in common with the people who would punish them?

Hopeless drunks like Dolan make up maybe one percent of the driving public. But it should come as no surprise that they’re involved in about one-quarter of all roadway deaths and in about half of all roadway deaths on weekend nights. The only bright note in these statistics is that sometimes the people they kill include themselves.

Even the liquor industry is alarmed by out-of-control alcoholics. It has started a National Hardcore Drunk Driver Project to stop recidivist drunk drivers. The industry cites research about how law enforcement needs to identify repeat drunk drivers swiftly and make sure they face certain punishment. That’s a pretty standard prescription for dealing with any small deviant population that’s responsible for a large problem.

But that’s not how it goes. Instead, for their habitual criminal negligence, repeat DUI offenders are commonly rewarded with jaywalking-level justice: reduced charges, probation, suspended sentences, house arrest. The excuses abound. A revoked driver’s license can cost someone his job. Jail can ruin someone’s life. Jails are already too crowded. Clever DUI lawyers have learned how to work the courts. Alcoholism is a disease for which the appropriate response is treatment, not prison.

Pennsylvania, as it happens, is the only state that includes alcohol abuse, along with epilepsy, as a medical condition that can result in a recalled driver’s license. But last August, after a Lebanon County doctor actually reported a heavy-drinking patient to PennDOT for possible license recall, the man’s legal challenge made headlines. It turns out that although thousands of habitual DUI offenders are arrested each year in Pennsylvania, only a few hundred of them are medically prohibited from driving. It seems like even most doctors who treat alcoholics want to believe they don’t necessarily drive drunk. Perhaps the doctors reason that an alcoholic can control his level of impairment in a way an epileptic can’t. But if compulsive drinkers could maintain their powers of reasoning and avoid driving while drunk, alcoholism might not even be considered a disease.

I can’t help thinking how alcoholism, as it happens, is a well-known occupational hazard in the legal profession, just as it is among police ranks. Every county seat is home to a tight little legal community in which it’s well known which colleagues — at the bar and on the bench — have problems with the bottle. A justice system that coddles dangerous drunks just might be closing ranks at society’s expense.

Maybe that’s harsh, but it’s also hard not to notice that drunk drivers are predominantly white, male and middle-class — just like Digger Dolan. In other words, it could be that the justice system — from the cops to the judges — looks at drunk drivers, sees its own image, and avoids giving out the punishment needed to protect the public.

If that’s not true, I’d like to see the system start to prove it. Up in Canada, they’ve had great results by trolling for repeat offenders near popular happy-hour haunts. It’s called hunting where the ducks are. So let’s see some more of these sobriety checkpoints, and not just near the seedy dives in Bristol. Put them up on Friday nights near the bars that rim the local county courthouses. You’ll know we’re getting somewhere the night you see a sobriety checkpoint at Broad and Spring Garden, outside the Fraternal Order of Police clubhouse, and another at the parking garage on Locust behind the Palm.