Folks I believe that I can be the voice of reason here as I stand witness to this back and forth volley of criminality v. economics.
We, as police officers, all like to believe that we and our families are above ever DWLS. It's just not realistic to subscribe to such categorical denial. We believe in the laws and many of us believe in enforcing them until it involves us or someone close to us. When our spouse, mother/father, brother/sister, daughter/son get a ticket then we begin to change our posture quickly on the whole traffic enforcement idea. Only then do we begin to abandon some our myopic views of what society really is, rather than what it should be or how we would come to define it.
The excerpt of the "habitual traffic offender" statute is a splendid illustration of why a driver that doesn't have the best of driving skills, and also doesn't make a salary even close to what ours is, should not be criminalized and put into prison because of "pure economics."
I am thinking that this should begin to settle things down between these radical views that are being expressed about ordinary people getting caught up in a "web of economic adversity" and then being thrown into a prison because they are some hardened criminal. We are not talking about those people that are violent criminals that should be in prison. Those types of people, which is just a small fraction of the minority of what we encounter daily, would be incarcerated, if not for the DWLS, then for something else.