by Dan Williams
I, too, have fond memories of wasted nights, days, and everything in between; I have my fair share of stories of missing jail by a hair’s breath; I have my one story of being in jail. (One night in February 2011; it’s a good story, involving Steely Dan and chemicals, but I won’t go into that here.)
I have seen my friends turn into alcoholics, delirium tremens and the works; I have seen them become heroin addicts, pill poppers, speed freaks. I have seen marijuana suck the brains out of someone’s head. (And in short, I was afraid.) Chances are, so have you. Or you will.
The Des Moines Register has an ongoing series on “Iowa’s drinking problem.” Part of that includes an online collection of all the individuals killed by drunk driving last year, including details about the accidents. It’s a moving exhibition. Here you see photos of about one-third of those killed. Some of the photos are of drivers who killed themselves in the process.
The recent interest in drunk driving appears to derive partly from an incident in Des Moines of March 26, 2016. An individual collided with a police SUV at 102 mph going the wrong way on I-80. Two officers, a prisoner they were transporting, and the drunk driver were all killed. The picture of the accident looks like an inferno. You can see the black outline of what looks like a car; the rest is engulfed in flames.
The most informative was the article “Iowa is a great place to live if you are a drunk,” despite the provocative title. Around two-thirds of the way down the article, Des Moines Police Chief Dana Wingert asks, “Do we need stiffer penalties? Higher fines? Longer jail terms?”
The tone of many of the Register’s articles seems to point to “longer jail terms.” This is because the newspaper emphasizes that approximately 33 out of the 82 drunk-driving fatalities in 2016 were caused by repeat offenders. Longer jail terms, or minimum sentencing laws for repeat offenders arguably would have prevented some of these needless deaths.
Punitive measures aside, there is a definite cultural aspect to address as well. Lawyer John Pfaff has shown, in research on the mass-incarceration problem, that stricter laws don’t always mean longer sentences because prosecutors aren’t required to pursue the strictest punishment. Sometimes, if they believe a law is too strict, they will try to prosecute for a lower offense. Increase in prison and jail terms is correlated not just with the severity of the law but with “cultural or attitudinal adjustments” that direct the justice system’s attention.
That Iowans seem to have an innate “attitudinal adjustment” to a “culture” of binge drinking is apparent to any native of or transplant to the state. One gander at RAGBRAI would do the trick. But there are larger forces at work, too. A controversial paper by Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, published in 2015, argued that non-Hispanic whites have been dying “deaths of despair” (e.g., suicide, drug overdose, liver disease/failure) in such volumes that the mortality rate for 45-54 year olds of this demographic has, since 1999, astonishingly increased.
These “deaths of despair” are not evenly distributed, however. They fall most heavily on those without a college education. This is the “white and unsatisfied” demographic that helped propel President Trump into office.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats have a silver-bullet solution for these troubles. But until we can re-weave the social fabric, we should expect to see self-destructive behavior and “deaths of despair” increase in the Heartland.