It’s no secret: Wisconsin is one of the drunkest states in the nation. To students of the University of Wisconsin who live in downtown Madison and are familiar with the typical mayhem of Thursday, Friday and Saturday evenings, this factoid is rather unsurprising.
A more eye-opening observation is while Wisconsin consistently ranks as a state with one of the worst drunken driving rates in the country, it is still the only state in which the first drunken driving offense is not criminal, but rather a municipal violation, i.e. a serious traffic ticket.
However, a set of bills recently introduced in the state Assembly and Senate would require first time offenders to appear in court. The bills would criminalize a first offense with a blood alcohol concentration greater than 0.15 and require the offender to serve jail time if his or her drunken driving results in personal injury. The bills also specify criminal penalties for drunken driving offenses that result in death and repeat offenses.
Lawmakers have been trying to address this issue for years. In fact, it seems like every other legislative session includes a bill that would increase criminal penalties for drunken driving. These efforts have run up against a number of serious obstacles.
First of all, there is a reason that many states in the country have rather lax drunken driving laws – the operating costs of state prisons increase rapidly with the number of prisoners. Because drunken driving is such a common crime, requiring a majority of drunken drivers to serve prison sentences is logistically daunting. For example, the Wisconsin Department of Corrections estimates that “the state also would need to spend $236 million to build 17 300-bed facilities to house the expected increase in people serving time for drunken driving,” reports the Wisconsin State Journal.
In this way, efforts to implement laws that would deter drunken driving lead inevitably to realistic cost-benefit analysis.
A more complex obstacle facing drunken driving legislation, such as the bills recently introduced at the Capitol, is the fact lawmakers and experts are still split on the relative benefits of punishment and treatment. Some lawmakers (for example Rep. Jim Ott, R-Mequon, and Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, the lead authors of the bills currently under consideration) feel that strong deterrents are necessary to force potential drunken drivers from getting behind the wheel while they are intoxicated.
On the other hand, experts such as Health First Wisconsin Executive Director Maureen Busalacchi focus on reducing the state’s binge drinking rate. Basalucchi says, “Our focus is really on the prevention side: How can we lower the drunken driving rates by reducing binge drinking”? reports the Wisconsin State Journal.
The bottom line is Wisconsin has to do something about drunken driving. Mothers Against Drunk Driving reports there have been 1,126 drunk driving fatalities in the state of Wisconsin in the past five years – suffice to say that maintaining the status quo is not an option at this point.
It is true that any plan to combat drunken driving must be based on a cost-benefit analysis – but the question isn’t whether or not the state can afford to spend $236 million on prison capacity. After all, any statewide effort to reduce the rate of drunken driving will be expensive. The better question is whether or not, in an effort to prevent drunken driving, there is a more effective way to spend $236 million than building new prisons facilities.
My guess is that this money could be put to better use. Ultimately, Wisconsin doesn’t simply have a problem with drunken driving – the state’s high drunken driving rate is symptomatic of the fact Wisconsin has a problem with drinking in general. According to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, “Wisconsin’s rates of alcohol use and misuse have been among the highest – if not the highest in the nation. As of 2010, Wisconsin adults continue to have the highest rate of binge drinking among all U.S. states and territories.”
Increasing criminal penalties might inspire a healthy fear of punishment in potential drunken drivers, but it will not address the underlying cause of drunken driving – namely, widespread alcohol abuse. If the state is dead set on spending millions of dollars to combat drunken driving, it may as well attempt to deal with the public health issue of alcohol abuse rather than building new prisons.
Charles Godfrey ([email protected]) is a junior majoring in physics and math.
