Penalties of Drunk Driving; A Theoretical Analysis

According to Garofalo, someone who has been influenced by alcohol may be lacking to common trait of pity. Lack of the pity trait allows one to forget to feel upset about the idea of injury to another person. They’ve grown numb to the idea, because there is no pity in them (Criminal Theory p 23). Freud would enhance that idea by explaining that a person who has allowed themselves to become influenced by alcohol has not had the ability to grow a trait called the ego and lives based on the pleasure principle. The pleasure principle not only works to allow such a person to become inebriated, but the same principle allows them to forget the feel pity for a possible victim of an accident in favor of the pleasure of making it to the destination of choice (Criminal Theory p 26). In the same sense, Ferri might argue that either coupled with these two afore mentioned traits or even without them, if the individual lacks the ability to reach their destination (i.e. a trip home for the evening, etc) they would feel compelled to get in their car and drive home, in spite of the fact that they are inebriated (Criminal Theory p 20,21). According to Shaw and McKay, a person driving a vehicle while drunk may have developed the behavior from watching other’s engage in it (Criminal Theory p 39). Southerland would add that such behavior also comes about by weighing ones needs with the definitions of legal violations. If driving home after an evening of drinking to comfort a wife and children or parents after setting a curfew outweigh the current definition of an unfavorable violation of the law, one will go ahead and drive home no matter the state of inebriation (Criminal Theory p 43). And finally, according to the ideas of strain theory, one might also weigh the outcome of not making it to their destination against the outcome of the possibility of getting in an accident and decide that the negative stimuli experienced by staying are too harsh to not take the chance of driving drunk (Criminal Theory pp 64-73). According to these theories, as far as weighting the outcomes are concerned, it would appear that increasing the penalties for drunk driving might serve to aid in slowing the occurrence of drunk driving, but when assessing the root of the problem, if alcohol is really a result of the lack of ego and then the inability to feel pity results, then weighing the outcome is no longer as simple as penalty verses results of not getting where your going, it becomes an effect of fulfillment and a realization of the human impacts plus the weighing of penalties against the sociological outcome of not reaching one’s destination and therefore, assessing a program to curve the rate of drunk driving becomes that much more complicated. The individual may no longer be thinking of the legal sanctions but more the fulfillment of personal needs like security while forgetting the dangers.

Raising the penalties on many crimes becomes a major issue when trying to assess the benefit. According to positivist school and criminal justice reform system, the system should be set up so that prisoners were not able to leave prison until they had been rehabilitated, and once rehabilitated they should be released (Criminal Theory p21). There are many other social theories, strain theories, and American Dream theories that creates crime as a result of your social environment coupled with the weighing of benefits verses consequences both on a social level as well as a legal penalty level. The American Dream theory also mentions that there are certain controls in society that keep certain people from achieving this dream, which creates a strain event in which the individual feels that social outcomes are more important than legal sanctions. With these theories combined, it appears that just raising the penalties for crime isn’t the most comprehensive decision, but that a more rehabilitative approach may be the most effective way to reduce the occurrence of time. Rehabilitation may be something as small as teaching the criminal beyond the idea of controls against the American Dream all the way to basic life skills, anger management, the attainment of empathy and pity, and a rearrangement of the realization of what is acceptable legal violations against unacceptable legal violation.

Reference:

Ball, Richard A., Cullen, Francis T., and Lilly, J. Robert. “Criminological Theory; Context and Consequences”. 2007, Sage Publications Inc, California. [Criminal Theory].