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Solution To The Speeding Problem

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joggerjayne | 09:10 Tue 03rd Sep 2013 | News
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All speeding offences should carry a mandatory minimum one year custodial sentence.

No discretion.

No slap on the wrist.

If you ignore the speed limit, one year in prison, and a three year driving ban when you are released.
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It would work, at a cost. Research years ago showed that severe punishments were a deterrent in minor offences, apparently because most people are law abiding and are also mindful of the consequences. So the death penalty for parking illegally would be about 100 per cent effective in stopping it. Unfortunately, and contrary to popular belief, this does not...
09:38 Tue 03rd Sep 2013
Just think how many prisons we'd need!
No...

It all depends on the circumstances.
Wouldnt help the over crowded prison issues
Plus, that means I would have had to go to prison 3 years ago for going 35mph in a 30mph zone! Mixing with murderers, rapists and armed robbers
We could always release the rapists, child molesters etc to make room!
Question Author
Nobody would have to mix with murderers.

Everyone can choose not to speed.
no problem for me....... I am a professional kerb crawler
Question Author
Laws are made to be obeyed.

Including the road traffic laws.
Is speeding a problem? perhaps the solution is to limit the top speed of vehicles and raise the minimum age of driving to 25. More daft ideas avaiable on request ;-)

Why stop there JJ,
why not make it a Capital Offence?
So a person doing 31 mph in a 30 limit has to go to prison for a year. Great idea.

Or maybe only prison for 32mph or 33mph or 33mph or 35mph or 40 mph, where do you draw the line?

I assume you don't drive because if you did you would realise that the speed limit can change very quickly from one section of road to another.

I was driving at 40mph along a 40mph road when all of a sudden it dropped to a 30 mph speed limit (even though it was a dual carriageway) and I did not notice the road sign.

I was done for speeding. Should I go to prison for a year?
joggerjayne

Wouldn't that be a rather heavy mallet to crack a relatively small nut?

It would be pretty easy (in town) to identify everyone breaking the speed limit, but would we really want to send every single person who drove at 31 in a 30 mph zone to jail, for a year?

What I mean by big mallet/small nut is that the 1 mph over the speed limit in urban areas makes not a jot of difference in the real world.

Doing 60mph in a 30 zone...I grant you is a completely different story.

Yes but the punishment has to fit the seriousness of the crime. Ok speeding is potentially dangerous, death by dangerous driving for instance carries a hefty custodial sentence. But simply, like me, to be caught out by a police speed trap doing 4.6mph over the limit, I should do a year in prison, lose my job, my home??
Wasn't copying VHG with my example of 31mph in a 30 zone. We were writing at the same time.

Honest.
What about people being rushed to hospital?

JJ would say,
"So What about them?"
It would work, at a cost. Research years ago showed that severe punishments were a deterrent in minor offences, apparently because most people are law abiding and are also mindful of the consequences. So the death penalty for parking illegally would be about 100 per cent effective in stopping it. Unfortunately, and contrary to popular belief, this does not work for very serious crimes, particularly murder; murderers are in a special category, since they rarely think of the consequences or they think that they will never be caught. The real deterrent in other really serious crimes is the belief that it is inevitable that the offender will be caught;100 per cent detection rate will drive criminals to some other crime where the detection rate is low. The period of imprisonment doesn't really matter if the offender is always caught immediately because he'll rarely be out of jail if he repeats the offence!
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There was a thread yesterday discussing the idea of cars (and motorbikes) being fitted with devices to automatically slow them down when entering speed restricted areas.

I said that it was dangerous to have a GPS satellite taking control of thousands of cars, and there would be injuries and fatalities. When the same idea was discussed by the last Parliament, five years ago, it was abandoned because they realised how dangerous it was.

In reply to my suggestion that people would be killed if the control of their car was taken away while driving, I was told that ...

Drivers can choose whether or not to speed. If you don't want to be killed, don't speed.

Well, I'm watering down the consequences of speeding from possible death, to imprisonment.

Nobody is forced to speed.

If the Govt are really serious about reducing speed on the roads, make it a custodial offence. Any other measures are just window dressing.
Question Author
For that interesting bit of criminology and jurisprudence, I'm giving Fred the Best Answer. Obviously it won't all fit into the little space.
FredPuli43

The problem with the 'minimum one year custodial sentence' is that it would punish those who really don't need to be punished, and whose incarceration wouldn't bring any societal benefits.

The pensioner doing 31 mph on an empty road, sent to jail for a year.

The businesswoman driving at 71mph on the M6 at 02:00 in the morning. I think there's more harm in introducing draconian laws like these than good.

Sidebar - when I was a kid, I thought that draconian referred to things from a country called Draconia.

Seriously.

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