Comment by Marsymars

I don’t think the pendulum has ever really swung towards high-effectiveness interventions, only, as you call them, harsh ones.

As far as DUIs are concerned I’m specifically not in favour of harsh jail time and fines due to their lack of effectiveness and collateral damage.

Interventions to allow a short feedback loop to stop the crimes being prevented simply haven’t been tried at scale for DUIs - think efforts like NYC’s anti-idling laws where you can collect a portion of the fine for reporting idling trucks.

Based on, among other things, my experience living for years without a car in both a medium-sized city and a small town, I find it unpersuasive to claim that anyone, including poor and minorities are better served by having community members drive drunk rather than not driving at all. We’ve quantified the costs of drunk driving (hundreds of billions of $) - I’d welcome anyone to quantify the economic benefits we get from allowing those with DUIs to continue to drive.