Judicial Disobedience of the Mandate to Imprison Drunk Drivers

We report here the results of two empirical studies of laws mandating a jail term of forty-eight consecutive hours for repeat-offender drunk drivers. In both cases, noncompliance by judges, abetted by other criminal justice system actors, was extensive, and substantial proportions of offenders were not imprisoned as mandated. We explain these findings as evidence of both a disjunction between formal and operative definitions of the behavior in question-drunk driving-and the great difficulty of controlling the discretion of actors in the criminal justice system.