I have no problem with taking away the driving license of a multiple-offense drunk driver forever (or its actuarial equivalent, say 15 years).
Nor do I have a problem with making the first offense a four figure fine and a year revocation.
Nor do I have any problem with having a law against "vehicular homicide": If you put yourself in control of 200-300 horses of power, you are responsibile for the consequences when those horses stampede and kill your neighbor's child.
But what I object to is this notion that sending addicts/sociopaths/excessively-self-absorbed assholes to jail because their blood alcohol level is found to be 0.XXX is going to solve the problem.
If someone can't take the lesson of that first offense to heart, all the hammering them into jail, etc, isn't going to keep them from offending again. Because if they can't take that first lesson, their real problem isn't that they drink and drive. Their real problem is something worse. A problem that no amount of legislation or judicial toughness is going to be solving. The solution to those kinds of problems can only come from within, not without.
(Your ex sounds like one of those kinds of problems to me -- and no one other than he will ever solve his problems.)
Which brings me to the case of the "first offense." Or, more accurately, the "first time caught."
That's a different animal. But it's also an animal that we're never going to eliminate. All the education, all the nasty pictures of accidents I saw in high school, the knowledge that my parents and others whose opinion mattered to would come down on me harder than any law ever would (even now), didn't stop me from doing some really stupid things.
Fortunately for me, and fortunately for the world, we survived those moments of irresponsibility. Eventually the realization of possible consequences seeped in to my pinhead brain, and I stopped driving home on those occasions where I felt the need to over-indulge.
I was lucky. I came to that realization before I received a DUI or had an accident or any consequence worse than a horrible hangover and having to clean up puke.
But I also know a lot of people who never got that wakeup call until that first DUI. However harsh we make the penalty won't change that. And however harsh we make the penalty some people aren't going to get that wakeup call until they or someone else is dead. Magic bullets, education, adjudication, legislation, social ostracism -- that's just the shit sandwich part of the world.
My personal belief is that the best thing we could do to prevent that first offense is to require everyone to spend a few weeks
behind the bar, stone cold sober, during that period that starts about two hours before closing time and ends about an hour after ward. And maybe another few weeks doing happy hour behind the bar, also stone cold sober. That will open a lot of people's eyes in an "up close and personal" ways: Four martinis, or eight brews, "hale fellow and well met" -- these things look
a lot different when you're standing behind the bar.
But that's not going to stop everyone. Nothing will. Alas.
And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God.
Romans 12:2 (NKJV)