The Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece last Friday that, according to the headline, offered “A Simple Fix For Drunken Driving.” I was intrigued because, frankly, I didn’t think there was one. As it turns out, the headline over-promises. The author, Stanford University psychiatry professor Keith Humphreys, does not purport to have a solution that ends impaired driving once and for all. Instead, Dr. Humphreys reports on the “stunning” results of South Dakota’s “absurdly simple” 24/7 sobriety program for repeat DWI offenders. The South Dakota program. In 2004, the South Dakota attorney general launched the 24/7 Sobriety Project, which required twice-a-day breath tests as a condition of pre-trial release for defendants who had been rearrested for DWI. A defendant who tested positive for alcohol or who failed to appear for testing was immediately confined to jail for a short period, typically one or two days. Researchers from the Rand Corporation evaluated the program’s effectiveness in a study published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2013. They analyzed results from 3.7 million breath tests taken from 2005 to 2010. They reported that 99.3 percent of the tests were clean, .36 percent were positive for alcohol, and .34 percent were no shows. The researchers found that the program led to a 12 percent reduction in repeat arrests for DWI and a 9 percent reduction in domestic violence arrests. Swift and certain punishment. Dr. Humphreys attributes the success of the 24/7 program to the “swift, certain and modest” penalties imposed upon [...]
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