Reports about accidents caused by drunk drivers are often plastered across the news pages. There have been some truly terrible accidents lately, and as a result, police have started carrying out large-scale roadside inspections once again, while the Ministry of Justice has also been taking action, such as making penalties for drunk drivers who cause fatal accidents harsher, setting up a system for placing drunk drivers in preventative custody and even recommending that amendments be made to the Social Order Maintenance Act (社會秩序維護法) that would make it possible for police to apply directly to courts for the power to detain repeat offenders for three days, regardless of whether the offender has caused an accident.
The increase in roadside inspections and heavier punishments make it seem like a lot of big decisions are being made to stop this problem, but once stories about drunk driving disappear from the news, will drunk drivers really change their behavior? If 10 random people on the street were asked this question, all of them would probably answer in the negative.
A quick read of amendments to laws against drunk driving in recent years shows that this behavior was criminalized 13 years ago. The first punishments stipulated for this offense were a prison sentence or detention of less than one year or a maximum fine of NT$30,000 (US$1,000).
After a public uproar in October last year when firefighter Lai Wen-li (賴文莉) was hit by a drunk driver while on duty and had to have her leg amputated below the knee as a result, the legislature amended the law, increasing the maximum sentence from one year to two years imprisonment or a fine of up to NT$200,000. Legislators also added clauses stipulating prison sentences of one to seven years for drunk drivers who cause deaths and a six-month to five-year sentence for those who cause severe injury.
In spite of this, incidences of drunk drivers killing people and causing serious traffic accidents keep appearing in the news.
Data from the Ministry of Justice show a 6.5 percent increase in the yearly resolution of drunk-driving cases in district prosecutors’ offices nationwide — last year, about 70,000 people were investigated for or charged with drunk driving. Data from the National Police Agency show that deaths caused by drunk driving increased by 3.3 percent last year compared with the year before, and that of the more than 2,000 fatal traffic accidents that occurred last year, more than 20 percent were the result of drunk driving.
While penalties are getting heavier, incidents involving drunk driving continue to increase. Obviously, heavier penalties alone cannot stop drunk driving, so policies must adopt new measures if they are to be successful in stopping drunk driving.
Judging from the behavior of drunk drivers, imposing strict laws and punishments is not an effective deterrent. A better way of dealing with this would be to look at the experience of other nations like the US, where authorities’ approach is to try to prevent drunk driving before it happens.
In the US, the number of deaths caused by drunk driving over the past five years has been greatly reduced, by one-quarter, from more than 13,000 deaths per year to approximately 10,000. Of the various actions taken to prevent drunk driving, the most notable is a law about a breath alcohol ignition interlock device (BAIID) that has been adopted in three-quarters of US states.
This law makes it compulsory for those with a record of drunk driving to install a BAIID in their cars. This device ensures that a car engine will not start if a driver is tested to have more than the allowed alcohol level in a breath test. Once they pass the breath test and their engine starts, the device still monitors the driver so if they exceed the allowed limit, the system will make a record of it and activate an alarm. Statistics from a large number of studies suggest that since this law has been enacted and repeat drunk drivers have been made to install this device, deaths caused by drunk driving have been significantly reduced, in some cases by up to 50 percent.
Behind each drunk driving death there is one or several broken families as well as emotional scars that will never heal. However, drunk driving is not like a plane crash or extreme natural disaster that causes collective trauma in society, and this is also why the high costs of drunk driving are often ignored by the public and the government.
The social costs of drunk driving are high. Statistics from the Bureau of National Health Insurance show that the bureau applies for compensation on behalf of 90,000 victims of drunk driving per year from those who caused the accidents and their insurance companies, with annual claims reaching between NT$2.5 billion and NT$2.7 billion. This clearly shows how society pays a huge social cost for drunk driving.
It is not only the government that has a responsibility to stop drunk driving; the public also has to think about this issue. If we look at the experience of other countries, apart from giving out heavy penalties, the Taiwanese government should also consider increasing alcohol taxes, drawing up laws for joint responsibility, promoting driver services for intoxicated people and other methods like the installation of BAIID devices in cars. These are better ways to get drunk drivers off our roads and to allow people to live in a safer society.
Jason Yeh is an associate professor of finance at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Translated by Drew Cameron
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