A black mom was trying to cross the street from a bus stop, because the nearest crosswalk was almost a mile away. A driver hits her child and she gets blamed for “jay walking”. Just an insanely evil country.
The three strikes would not lead to a prison sentence, just permanent license revocation. If the driver in question continues to drive at that point, they have demonstrated that they are a danger to society and must be removed from it for the safety of others.
Further, just imposing fines for unlicensed driving would effectively make it legal for rich people to drive recklessly. That, if anything, would be reactionary.
You’re contradicting yourself, immediately above you say mandatory prison sentence. Also, nowhere did I advocate for fines, I just noted that carceral justice systems are not functional in their main goal of reducing crime.
What I’m getting at is, if we say the 3rd strike doesn’t cause prison time, but the 4th does, all you’ve done is create a 4 strike system. Do you have any empirical evidence that contradicts the mountains of evidence on the lack of efficacy in 3-strike systems that would make a 4-strike system necessarily better and more functional?
You’re contradicting yourself, immediately above you say mandatory prison sentence.
For driving after permanent license revocation. That could perhaps have been clearer; consider it clarified.
Let’s start from first principles and see where we disagree:
- Driving is a privilege, not a right.
- That privilege, if repeatedly abused, should be removed permanently.
- Once removed, further driving must be disincentiviced, and if necessary, punished.
- The disincentive/punishment must apply to rich and poor alike.
- It therefore cannot be purely monetary.
If you disagree with any of the above, I’d like to know which, and why. If you agree with them all, what disincentive/punishment do you suggest, if not incarceration?
I disagree with the entire conception of punitive and carceral justice, as does the data when comparing to systems based on restorative and community driven justice approaches that directly empower the community to effect justice.
I think that in order to effect any meaningful change in criminality, including simple criminality such as we have here, we need to entirely abandon the idea that punishing people is an effective approach to reducing criminality. We literally have decades of data showing the opposite, that criminalization and carceral Justice create criminals and create more effective and dangerous criminals. Why would it be any different in this case?
We need to focus on restoring the victims as much as possible, and empowering them within the justice system to have a meaningful say in whatever actions are taken towards that restoration and prevention of further crime, but not by empowering them to criminalize and incarcerate people.
If our goals in reacting to crime are to minimize harm to victims, minimize future harms to other unrelated potential victims, and to restore to the best of our ability the harms done by the perpetrator, then we should focus on that, and not punishing those who commit crime, because the two are unrelated.
