Stiffer penalties may deter repeat offenders

There’s really nothing remarkable about the five court cases we looked up Monday morning.

Three are drunken driving cases, one involves an alleged violation of a domestic violence protective order and one consists of a single count of driving on a revoked license.

What makes them interesting, though, is that this is how the court system started out the New Year. These are the first five cases filed here in 2011.

Through a quirk of court system record keeping, it’s not hard to track these cases down. Cases are assigned numbers sequentially and at the end of the year the counter re-sets.

Last year the counter ran all the way up to 3,493 before the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve. And that’s just the criminal cases. The court separates out minor infractions like speeding tickets into their own category.

Even if all 3,493 of those cases were brought against different individuals — and we’re positive they were not — that means roughly 3 percent of Mat-Su Valley residents made court appearances on criminal charges this year.

Which actually isn’t a bad statistic when you think about it. We here in the Valley, it seems, are generally a law-abiding people. Greater than 97 percent of us made it through the year without a life-changing trek through the legal system.

As for those first five cases; we don’t want to draw any broad conclusions. There is nothing scientifically rigorous about looking into the court records and finding out who were the first five people to get tossed in the slammer this year.

But, in a paradoxical way, perhaps the most noteworthy thing about those cases is how completely uninteresting they are. All five of those defendants are very likely not going to warrant a mention in these pages outside of the Police Beat blotter.

That three of them are drunken driving arrests probably speaks more to the nature of the way most Americans celebrate New Year’s Eve than anything. But, honestly, from what we’re hearing, that’s only a slight increase from the steady flow of drunken drivers that pass through our court system every day.

We were likewise not surprised to see domestic violence made the list or that revoked license charge.

Drunken driving is a problem many people smarter than us have tried to solve. And yet it continues to be a problem. Domestic violence is likewise a big issue we tackle from time-to-time in editorials.

But these categories of crime are long-standing leaders in the Mat-Su Valley and across Alaska. Too often drivers arrested once for driving under the influence offend again. Too often people arrested for domestic violence ignore the protective orders in place or, go on to perpetuate their crimes on other victims.

Maybe it’s time for our legislators to endow our laws with sharper teeth that might deter repeat offenders who sometimes amass three, four or five drunken driving charges. Perhaps it’s time to draft legislation that would take the vehicle (whether they owned it or not) of anyone caught driving drunk for the second time.

Perhaps higher bail amounts and longer mandatory jail sentences for men and women convicted of domestic violence would also reduce the number of repeat offenders appearing in the Police Beat.

Though we know stiffer penalties alone won’t be enough to change people’s behaviors, we remain optimistic that with each reminder more and more of our neighbors will take the message to heart: you should never drive while drunk or raise your hand against another.

That’s our hope, anyway.