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Originally Posted by Mr.Coffee
No perfect justice system or answer. However my personal (and I’m confident unpopular) opinion is that the Canadian justice system focuses too much on “rehabilitation” (eyeroll), leniency and principles of forgiveness, which are mainly covers to reduce costs as opposed to what should also be a system delivering punishment and relinquishment of freedom when especially breaking laws where people die.
Drunk driving laws, especially, are wildly lax. There are people I have heard of who have been arrested multiple times for drunk driving and still have their license, etc. just absurd.
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Rehab should probably be the top priority if our goal is to decrease things like this. There's plenty of examples of how a system that encourages harsh incarceration doesn't do much good. Releasing people more broken than they came in just creates a sinking ship.
Drunk driving is more complicated than just upping the penalty because by and large the people who are causing the deaths are so loser drunk they're operating on auto-pilot, chronic alcoholics, or often both.
The people who are going to have their eyes widened by a tougher jail sentence are probably the people who wouldn't cause such carnage in the first place. They're the have-3-or-4-and-should-really-call-a-cab people. Definitely worth getting off the roads, but they're not usually killing people. For this reason I don't see strengthening punishments as a bad thing at all (I just don't think it solves the overall problem).
If the goal is vengeance (and you're not crazy if that's where you land), then ya, tougher sentences will help that.
If the goal is to have fewer drunk driving deaths though, I think we need to focus more efforts on preventing trauma and strengthening addiction recovery.