Maine’s not tough enough on drunk drivers, website says

Officer Pat Flynn pulled over a motorist for driving erratically on Coastal Highway in Ocean City, Maryland, on June 2, 2012. (Baltimore Sun/TNS photo)

Officer Pat Flynn pulled over a motorist for driving erratically on Coastal Highway in Ocean City, Maryland, on June 2, 2012. (Baltimore Sun/TNS photo)

The researchers at WalletHub, the finance website that serially releases state-by-state data analyses, has in recent weeks produced two reports highlighting how each state deals with intoxicated and high-risk drivers, respectively.

In both, Maine finished among the bottom half of states.

In the report on drunk driving, each was ranked on the severity of penalties for charges of driving while intoxicated, as well as prevention measures used in each place.

In the study ranking each state’s toughness on high-risk drivers, the states were judged based on that aforementioned drunk driving criteria, combined with analyses of their enforcement of speeding laws, reckless driving penalties, and increases in insurance costs for bad behavior.

To be clear, WalletHub pumps out these nationwide reports, dealing with wide varieties of subject matters, quite regularly. They’re meant as broad brush analyses and are good conversation starters, but don’t drill down on nuances of each state. Sometimes there are factors at play in one state that aren’t in another, and the rankings are skewed a bit as a result.

In the case of the high-risk and intoxicated driver studies, Maine actually scored pretty well by most criteria. The state ranked 19th in terms of each OUI prevention efforts and penalties for reckless driving, as well as 23rd — still in the top half of all states — in the enforcement of speeding laws.

But the state fell to No. 34 overall based on what WalletHub considered a particularly poor showing in terms of the criminal penalties for drunk driving, a category in which the site dropped Maine all the way down to No. 43 (or 9th worst, with Washington, D.C. being counted as a 51st state).

Maine has no minimum jail sentence for first offenses of OUI and minimum sentences of seven days in jail for second offenses, WalletHub reports. The state also lists no requisite numbers of offenses at which drunk driving becomes an automatic felony, and the crime carries a three-month administrative license suspension.

In Arizona, the No. 1 state in terms of toughness on drunk driving by this analysis, an individual convicted of driving while intoxicated is given a mandatory jail term of at least 10 days on his or her first offense.

In West Virginia (No. 4), drunk drivers get 180 days in the slammer for their second offenses. In Georgia (No. 9), they lose their licenses for a full year.

WalletHub‘s analysis breaks states down simply based on the severity of penalties. What it doesn’t get into is the effectiveness of those penalties.

As counterintuitive as it may first appear, multiple studies published over the years have found jail terms do little to prevent drunk drivers from offending again, while license suspensions — paired with education programs — are better at reducing recidivism.

WalletHub’s ranking of states’ toughness on drunk driving offenders:

Source: WalletHub