MORE ENFORCEMENT, NOT HARSHER PENALTIES

For at least the last 20 years, drunk driving in Canada has been attacked
with a combination of public education, spot checks, and increased criminal
punishments, including imprisonment. Over the same period, drunk driving
has substantially decreased. It's probable most Canadians assume tougher
punishments were crucial to that happy result, and even tougher punishments
will reduce drunk driving even further.

Finland's experience with drunk driving strongly suggests that assumption
is wrong.

Like all the Nordic countries, Finland has long had serious problems with
alcohol abuse. The traditional Finnish response relied heavily on criminal
law. Drunk driving, in particular, was severely punished: In the late
1960s, more than 80 per cent of convicted drunk drivers were given prison
sentences.

Finland abandoned this approach in the 1970s as part of the country's
effort to cut the prison population. By 1981, only 12 per cent of convicted
drunk drivers were imprisoned. Instead, the standard punishment became a
fine combined with a conditional sentence that allowed offenders to avoid
prison if they obeyed certain conditions, such as not drinking.

If imprisonment effectively deters drunk driving, this switch would have
caused the crime to soar in Finland. Did it? That's not easily answered.
The levels of reported drunk driving did increase rapidly from the early
1970s to the end of the 1980s. But drunk driving is one of those crimes
that often goes undetected. This means that data on drunk driving, drawn
mainly from records of police arrests, are not reliable indicators of the
actual rate of drunk driving. If police increase their enforcement efforts,
for example, the number of reported crimes will rise -- but that alone
won't prove that there was an actual increase in drunk driving.

And that's exactly what happened in Finland. At the same time that
punishments were eased, police introduced the breathalyser and greatly
stepped up the number of spot checks -- from about 5,000 stops in 1977 to
one million in 1982. Over the same period, drunk-driving charges rose
rapidly. What did it mean? The rise in numbers may have just been the
result of the increased enforcement. Or it may have been that the lighter
punishments had increased the actual rate of drunk driving. It was
impossible to say for sure.

To overcome this problem, researchers at the University of Helsinki in 1978
worked with police to set up roadside stops that would check drivers at a
consistent rate. By keeping law enforcement constant, it would be
eliminated as a variable. Then, any apparent changes in the police numbers
would reflect real changes in drunk driving. These checks, says Tapio
Lappi-Seppala, director of the Finnish National Research Institute of Legal
Policy, produced "very reliable data about the number of drunken drivers."

The researchers made a compelling discovery. From 1978 to 1985, the actual
rate of drunk driving fell by half.

"So there was a drop in sentence severity and a rise in the risk of
detection," concludes Mr. Lappi-Seppala, "and the result was that actual
drunken driving fell by 50 per cent."

Most criminologists believe that increasing the chance of getting caught is
an effective way to cut crime, but increasing punishment is not. Finland's
drunk driving reforms were, in effect, a nationwide test of that theory --
a test that proved the criminologists absolutely right.