Prevention In The Stratosphere

Shaming of wrongdoers in America goes back a long, long way. Think the stockades where early Colonists were held in public, the powers that be hoping they'd be embarrassed by the public ridicule.

That type of punishment has been proven ineffective, for the most part. Plus, with the Constitutional right of no cruel and unusual punishment, you don't often see people hung out to dry in your neighborhood.

Now, with the era of social networking, one D.A. in Texas is bringing a bit of the shaming punishment back to the forefront. The D.A. of Montgomery County, Texas is using Twitter to post the names of DUI offenders. Since beginning the practice, a couple dozen drunk drivers in Texas have had their names "revealed" to the public.

I put revealed in quotes for one reason: their DUI arrest is already public information. The D.A. is just using a creative and technologically advanced medium to get their names out in front of the public. Here's a link to an article and you can draw your own conclusions:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/6802419.html

One of the complaints of the practice says it's not right to single out drunk drivers. His wish is that if the D.A. is going to do this, then the name of every arrestee should be put up on Twitter. My opinion? Fine by me!

The D.A. has a fine point: DWI is the biggest crime in his county. For such a prevalent crime, measures can be taken to try to prevent such a crime.

The use of Twitter to share the names of drunk drivers doesn't exactly fall into shaming alone. It's also a great preventative tool. If you were in this county, wouldn't you think twice about driving drunk to be sure your name is kept out of the media?

Either way, I applaud any efforts that keep drunk drivers off the road – when nearly 15,000 Americans are killed every year by this preventable crime, I'm glad someone in the criminal justice system is stepping up to try to make a difference.