DUI Law and Punishments
It’s no surprise that current DUI Law mandates that
DUI punishments cause problems in your personal life in the short term.
With punishments such as temporary loss of license, community
service, fines, alcohol education and assessment, etc… it forces you to
do some “rearranging” of your personal life.
But what isn’t always known by most is that the effects of DUI
charge will last
for years, even a decade. The
punishments actually serve as a barrier from getting past the offense and
moving on with your life for many years to come.
This is because the initial punishments cause a domino effect of
problems that can propagate through several years of someone’s life.
First, you’re forced to take a considerable amount of time off from work
to perform your community service which usually involves picking up litter
on the side of the highway. If
you’re paid by the hour that’s a considerable loss of income!
If you’re paid in salary there goes your whole vacation allotment
for the entire year (if you haven’t used it up already).
This is assuming that you even have a way to get to work since your
license has been temporarily suspended.
The irony of all of this is that with all of this commotion
you’re likely to lose your job while you need money to pay all of the
fines!
Potentially, you have someone who has either lost their job or has lost a
considerable amount of income by not being able to attend employment.
They are forced to pay the court fines and fees along with all of
their other monthly bills on an even smaller income then they had before
the offense. So what is
happening is all of your monthly expenses are rapidly increasing but your
income has either ceased to exist or significantly decreased.
If they lost their job due to the DUI then they now face the challenge of
trying to find a new job to secure some income but don’t have a
driver’s license for transportation and then also have to disclose on
the job application that they have been convicted of a DUI.
This makes finding any new work near impossible.
What does this do to someone’s mental state?
It makes them very emotional and very unstable.
Couple these feelings of anxiety with the animosity that a large
percentage of people feel when they get a DUI.
The animosity comes from the fact that a lot of people
are wrongly accused and convicted of this offense because so much
discretion is left up to the police officer during a dui stop.
Low
BAC
laws and political pressure funnel more and more innocent people into the
DUI system everyday.
What is the likelihood of a repeat offense when the punishments do this to
a person? The person’s
stress level and mental state has completely deteriorated and depression
is setting in. They’re
worrying about bankruptcy and future employment plans but at the same time
are unable to help themselves because the courts have handicapped them.
Were all for punishments for people that break the rules but the
punishment has to fit the crime. It
has to be rehabilitative in nature if we actually want to fix the problem.
The current punishments instigate repeat offenses and worsen the
problem instead of fixing it.
Get help here: DUI
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