A black mom was trying to cross the street from a bus stop, because the nearest crosswalk was almost a mile away. A driver hits her child and she gets blamed for “jay walking”. Just an insanely evil country.
He pleaded guilty to hit-and-run, his third such offence
Three strikes policy must become a thing for reckless driving and related offences. After your third conviction you never get to drive a car again in your life.
“They’d just drive anyway”
Mandatory prison sentence and vehicle confiscation, regardless of who owns it. Unless it’s literaly stolen, it’s the owner’s responsibility to ensure the driver is legally allowed to drive.
“But not being able to drive is undue hardship”
Tough.
Being dead is undue hardship
“But not being able to drive is undue hardship”
Tough.More like, “Good.”
Maybe then some of those folks would start helping to lobby for zoning reform!
Three strike policies are shown to not decrease incidence of crime whatsoever, but rather primarily contribute to our already severely overcrowded prisons, and to people refusing to turn themselves in due to fear of imprisonment, to the point people will commit additional crimes just to stay out of jail.
Carceral Justice doesn’t work, and it’s purely reactionary to suggest it in any circumstance given it’s lack of efficacy.
The three strikes would not lead to a prison sentence, just permanent license revocation. If the driver in question continues to drive at that point, they have demonstrated that they are a danger to society and must be removed from it for the safety of others.
Further, just imposing fines for unlicensed driving would effectively make it legal for rich people to drive recklessly. That, if anything, would be reactionary.
You’re contradicting yourself, immediately above you say mandatory prison sentence. Also, nowhere did I advocate for fines, I just noted that carceral justice systems are not functional in their main goal of reducing crime.
What I’m getting at is, if we say the 3rd strike doesn’t cause prison time, but the 4th does, all you’ve done is create a 4 strike system. Do you have any empirical evidence that contradicts the mountains of evidence on the lack of efficacy in 3-strike systems that would make a 4-strike system necessarily better and more functional?
You’re contradicting yourself, immediately above you say mandatory prison sentence.
For driving after permanent license revocation. That could perhaps have been clearer; consider it clarified.
Let’s start from first principles and see where we disagree:
- Driving is a privilege, not a right.
- That privilege, if repeatedly abused, should be removed permanently.
- Once removed, further driving must be disincentiviced, and if necessary, punished.
- The disincentive/punishment must apply to rich and poor alike.
- It therefore cannot be purely monetary.
If you disagree with any of the above, I’d like to know which, and why. If you agree with them all, what disincentive/punishment do you suggest, if not incarceration?
I disagree with the entire conception of punitive and carceral justice, as does the data when comparing to systems based on restorative and community driven justice approaches that directly empower the community to effect justice.
I think that in order to effect any meaningful change in criminality, including simple criminality such as we have here, we need to entirely abandon the idea that punishing people is an effective approach to reducing criminality. We literally have decades of data showing the opposite, that criminalization and carceral Justice create criminals and create more effective and dangerous criminals. Why would it be any different in this case?
We need to focus on restoring the victims as much as possible, and empowering them within the justice system to have a meaningful say in whatever actions are taken towards that restoration and prevention of further crime, but not by empowering them to criminalize and incarcerate people.
If our goals in reacting to crime are to minimize harm to victims, minimize future harms to other unrelated potential victims, and to restore to the best of our ability the harms done by the perpetrator, then we should focus on that, and not punishing those who commit crime, because the two are unrelated.
Putting peope in prison was not the point of my original post; preventing repeat dangerous drivers from harming more people was. I’m absolutely open to alternatives to incarceration.
Do you have some examples of what could be done to minimize harm to victims and, in particular, prevent future crime?
I edited more into my comment, that may not have been visible when you responded. Cheers.
Jay walking laws are evil in the first place.
Take up google maps and measure that distance 0.3miles (~0.5km) on a stretch of road that you often walk, and consider how likely you would be to walk all that way and straight back just to cross the road (especially if you’re in a hurry). Honestly this is one of the most disgusting things I’ve read in a long time. That driver really should have lost his drivers license for a very long time the last time he did a hit and run.
The article says the nearest crossing was 0.3 miles away. It’s still bad but you’re making it sound worse than it is.
That’s still 10mins of walking. Fuck that.
Oh absolutely, but it’s not 40 minutes of walking like OP implied.
Still, I thought it was legal to cross if the nearest crosswalk was more than a block away. I’m sure it’s a "depends on the state thing…still bullshit though
I dunno, I’m from a place where jaywalking doesn’t exist.
Ah probably germany, even at night. No cars driving, waiting at a red light.
No…the UK. Jaywalking as a concept doesn’t exist, you’re entitled to cross the road wherever it’s safe (* with exceptions).
Wait, there are countries where crossing the road can be a crime? Screw that.
In the US early in the auto age it became a crime…like loitering, only enforced when convenient.
If you dislike that you’ll reeeally hate how many times bikers get blamed for getting run over…
Here in Finland it’s legal to cross the road if the closest crosswalk is further than 50 metres (164 feet), but cars still have the right of way so if you get hit, it is mostly your fault - they aren’t obviously legally allowed to just drive over you though.
More of a “fuck racism” thing than a “fuck cars” thing imo…
Why not both?
Gotta be careful when crossing the road
