meic wrote:karlt wrote:There is precious little evidence that harsher sentences have a deterrent effect either on offenders or on the population at large. Probability of being caught does. Given that in 99.9% of these cases there is no intent to cause harm, the problem is that it's widely expected that a prosecution is only likely if harm does occur; the driver does not expect he will cause harm because he normally gets away with these acts of careless driving and therefore he is not deterred.
I do not believe in sentencing by outcome. To my mind two drivers who both drive blinded by the sun are equally guilty and deserving of the same punishment even if one does kill someone and the other has no negative outcome at all; otherwise one is either rewarding one driver for good luck or punishing the other for bad luck - I don't see that as justice. There's a limited amount that can be done to catch people when there is no outcome, but that would be the ideal. What it does mean is that sentencing should be based on the potential of the driving to cause harm, not the harm that was actually caused.
That does mean that if someone is caught doing 70 down a 30 zone they should receive the same penalty as if they'd killed someone, which is an easily foreseeable result of driving in that manner.
Lack of evidence just shows they werent looking. However as Kwackers always points out you also need a fair possibility of the sentence being applied for it even to be an issue.
These cases are showing a lethal combination of very improbable, very light sentence.
No wonder nobody makes the effort.
As for evidence, I am aware of an experiment in the USA where a publicised severe penalty for pulling out in front of motorcyclists had a very pronounced but temporary effect.
Also the severity of drink driving sentences does have a very good effect on the population as a whole.
It's all very well to say that if they didn't find evidence they weren't looking, but policy should be based on evidence that exists, not evidence you think should exist.
Drink driving dropped when there was a massive drive to make it socially unacceptable by publicising the results - not the penalties, the results. I'd expect any behaviour to drop when there's publicity - as in the USA case - but as soon as the publicity stops the reduction is reversed unless a sustained change in societal attitudes has been achieved. Neither of these cases show that harsh sentences had a deterrent effect but they do indicate that publicity
does make people more aware of dangers. When a deterrent effect of sentencing is specifically looked for it is absent or at best very, very weak.
The deterrent is likely to be even lower in motoring cases because the intent isn't there. In this case, the driver didn't set out to kill. He didn't set out to be dangerous, even. If he'd thought "this could kill someone" when he drove into the sun, I'm willing to bet he wouldn't have done it - very few people are sufficiently sociopathic to think along the lines of "it's OK, if I kill someone I won't get much of a penalty, so I'll carry on", as some people on here seem to imply. The issue is, and remains, a lack of awareness of how dangerous these behaviours are.