Dui Offenders Harsh Rehabilitation Vs Harsh Legal Punishment
In Utah, even if you don’t get arrested for drunk driving you might still have to call your mom from jail sort of. The Utah Highway Patrol and some local bars hope letting people practice an uncomfortable call from the local lockup will help dissuade drinking and driving. A phone number has been set up to recreate what it would feel like to make such a call. After dialing 1-877-JAIL-FON, the caller is given the option to talk to a hysterical mother or a disapproving father, among others. A prerecorded message then plays one end of what the conversation might sound like, with the caller filling in the other half. Slogans associated with the campaign include “Getting a DUI is easy, calling your mom from jail is hard.”
Methods like this seem to be having a much great impact than the recent harsh legal punishment coming from states like Arizona. While most states are more interested in safety for there tax paying citizens, states like Arizona are becoming cash hungry giants. With photo radar in the same branch, recently things have gotten out of control in these areas. From false dui arrests to dirty cops, it doesnt seem like Arizona is interested in the safety of its people, but more the cash it generates. Veteran Hollywood Police Officer Dewey Pressley said he hated lying. But if bending the truth a little would keep a fellow officer out of trouble, well, he was all for it. A dashboard police camera video that surfaced recently showed an officer chuckling as he wrote a fake police report, calling his creativity “a little Walt Disney” so another officer wouldn’t get in trouble for rear-ending a 23-year-old woman’s car in February. Pressley and four others have been suspended with pay pending an investigation after video of the accident and the officers’ attempt to cover it up became public last week, the latest Internet sensation in a line of unsettling police dash cam videos. On the video, the officers, with calculating authority, are heard laughing about how drunk 23-year-old Alexandra Torrens-Vilas is and how they plan to “hang her out to dry” so the officer that hit her car doesn’t get in trouble. “I’m gonna tell you exactly how to word this so we can get him off the hook,” Pressley says on the video. Later he remarks: “I don’t like making things up ever because it’s wrong but if I have to bend it a little to protect a cop I’m gonna.” In the report, Pressley wrote Vilas got in the left lane and slammed on the brakes and blamed her for the accident.
While we continue this full front money war with the local politicians, its time we start thinking outside the box. While stealing millions of dollars from citizens seems like the simple way, why not get these offenders involved in the community with some community service hours. In these harsh economical times most people just simply dont have the money to pay. Instead of forcing bankruptcy, house lose, job loss, and scrounging for food, why not just give dui offenders a great amount of hours, getting them out of their usual drinking habits. This way offenders are receiving harsh rehabilitation, not harsh legal punishment.