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of drunk drivers, unlike drunk walkers or common drunkards—or burglars, for that matter—are members of the middle class. This gives them more clout in the system and certainly evokes more empathy from judges, jurors, and prosecutors. Kalven and Zeisel, in their study of the American jury (published in 1966), found evidence of this ambivalence in drunk driving cases. Many jury members sitting in judgment seemed to say to themselves, “There but for the grace of God go I,” or some equivalent. One judge told the researchers that jurors who drank were “inclined to be sympathetic,” and wanted “more proof of alcoholic influence than the law requires.”21

Attempts to put money and effort into the fight against drunk driving were usually ephemeral. Congress passed a Highway Safety Act in 1966. This law set up a National Highway Safety Bureau, later called the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. NHTSA made grants to support anti—drunk driving projects in various cities. But the program dribbled out in 1977. A Vermont report, covering the year 1969, expressed pessimism about the chances of tough enforcement of laws against drunk driving. Any increase in penalties was likely to be “counterproductive”; the public simply did not care. Putting drunk drivers in jail was a terrible idea; “reasonably clean and decent jail facilities” were unavailable; in any event, jailing caused “disruption” in the lives of those put in jail.22 Of course, jail was just as dirty and disruptive if you were a burglar or mugger. It was the class aspect of drunk driving that insulated drunk drivers from the fate of burglars and muggers.

The wheel began to turn in the seventies. An “extraordinary grass roots anti—drunk driving movement” sprang up at about this time. After a drunk driver killed a teenager in Schenectady, New York, in 1979, a woman named Doris Aiken founded Remove Intoxicated Drivers (RID). A similar and very active organization, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), was founded by Candy Lightner in 1980 in Sacramento, California. A drunk driver had killed Mrs. Lightner’s daughter.23

Drunk driving is, in some ways, an odd crime. James Jacobs has called it an “inchoate offense,” meaning that the crime is committed when you drink and drive even if nobody gets hurt at all.24 (It is not, of course, the only example of this kind of crime: carrying a concealed weapon is just as “inchoate,” and so, perhaps, is possession of drugs.) In any event, the social movements directed against drunk driving have, in a way, recriminalized it. In part, MADD is an aspect of a more general movement to assert the rights of victims. It is also, in some ways, a women’s crusade, a crusade of mothers on behalf of their children, against a macho ethos of reckless and drunken driving.

Nobody defends drunk driving or recklessness, of course, but a few scholars (Joseph Gusfield among them) feel that the whole business has been blown up out of all proportion. Drunk driving, they argue, is not a major social problem in the first place, and severe new penalties and crackdowns will, in the end, accomplish nothing. A much larger (silent) group no doubt agrees. These are the people who drink and drive, and their numbers probably include people in all walks of life, even judges, lawyers, and members of juries. Hence the campaign against drunk driving tends to make more of a mark on paper than it does in terms of real deterrence, or even in terms of severity of punishment.

No doubt educational drives and tighter rules have some effect; the question is how much. Two researchers, Ross and Voas, studied a crackdown that took place in the 1980s in New Philadelphia, Ohio. A judge there, Edward E. O‘Farrell, had announced his intention to get tough. Plea bargaining would not be tolerated, and every convicted drunk driver would go to jail for ten days. Judge O’Farrell won honors, and was invited to appear on talk shows, but the remorseless facts of Ross and Voas showed that the impact on driver behavior was pitifully small. Drivers knew about the policy; they were aware that