The Pros And Cons Of DUI Laws

It is a choice that many people act on after one too many alcoholic drinks: call for a cab or take the risk and drive carefully back home. Many would choose the latter, and in this flawed reasoning, one puts not only their lives, but the lives of others, at a huge risk. The single most irresponsible, illogical, and downright reckless act a human being can commit is driving while intoxicated. Driving while intoxicated can lead to terrible accidents where both victim and offender can be forever damaged, if not killed. Families, pedestrians, just about anyone can be a victim of such a heinous act. The biggest crime, however, is more or less in the actual accidents, but in the preventive measures taken to deter the act. While current DUI laws have

In New York, Leandra’s Law was passed. This law “…makes it a felony for anyone to drive with a blood alcohol level of .08 or higher while transporting a child under the age of 18. It also requires interlocks in vehicles of anyone convicted of driving while intoxicated” (Kiesbye 11). Elsewhere in Minnesota, the Implied Consent Law gives law enforcement the power to administer field blood, urine or breath tests when they believe someone is intoxicated, and should the offender refuse to take any test, their license is revoked for a year (Kiesbye

Psychologists have long pondered as to how we go about learning our behaviors. After lengthy studies, they determined that one of the ways we learn our behaviors is through operant conditioning. Laura King, author of The Science of Psychology: An Appreciative View, defines operant conditioning as “a form of associative learning in which the consequence of a behavior change the probability of the behavior’s occurrence” (King 193). Meaning simply that positively or negatively punishing a behavior will effect how often a behavior will happen again. In the case of DUI laws, by making the punishments extremely severe for intoxicated driving (therefore negatively punishing not just the offender, but all would-be offenders), there is a less likely chance that people will go out and drive drunk because they would not want to face such terrible extremes of the law.
One concern that one might have is over the reliability and standardization of this new law. An immediate license revocation and jail time should have extremely accurate ways of measuring intoxication levels. That being said, the practices done in the old laws will be updated to provide the most accurate intoxication levels and