I don't think drink driving penalties are harsh enough.

[ebxr8240]

They should attack it in other ways also.. Should have to prove your drinking habits have improved or stopped..Before getting your licence back..
Second time should be "at least" 1 week jail esp if with in 2/3 years of previous conviction.. Car confiscated etc
In N.Z you serve atleast 1 month jail second offence..
A fine is just not enough !!

[russellw]

Originally Posted by vztrt

Would you think that the 1.5% of jail terms would be from the driver actually killing someone, or something that would not allow anything less then a jail term?

That might perhaps serve as an explanation except the penalty is that awarded for the PCA offence rather than for some alternate charge such as dangerous driving or manslaughter.

It is a lot of people and there is insufficient data to tell whether these are short sentences or what other circumstances applied. In NSW, where this data came from, a prior PCA offence is only considered in the statistics if it was committed within a 5 year time frame so perhaps some of those jail sentences were for offenders outside that 5 year time window who had previous high level PCA offences.

Cheers
Russ

[russellw]

Most States now mandate either a prescribed course or some form of interlock program but the take up rates in the voluntary programs are only in the order of 10% of offenders - and these usually come from the higher range or repeat offender groups.

This would seem to be partly a result of the cost and / or the additional requirement in some States for mandatory assessment and counselling.

The table below shows the current state of play (as far as I can ascertain) for each of the jurisdictions:



Cheers
Russ