I would find your argument more compelling with a different example like shoplifting or vandalism: still deeply anti social, but not killing innocent people who are just going about their business.

my thing is I'm all for justice but not justice that creates more of the same problem in others or the same people giving them even more reason to give up with, well, it's like branding people on the forehead. Why be surprised when the outcast keeps doing outcast stuff when they're never allowed to be anything but an outcast? it's like if society shot itself in the foot then is outraged demanding to know who shot it in the foot.

tryin to say it feels good but just feelin good don't fix nothin

A DUI conviction is something you could judge someone personally, but causes mayhem on a societal level.

Near as I can tell, approximately 1% of licensed drivers get arrested for DUI a year, and most have repeat offenses.

That doesn’t strike me as any more of a society wide ‘impossible’ issue than anything else?

One thing I have noticed though - problem drinkers are amazing at making it always someone else’s fault.

For the record, I don't drink.

One thing I have noticed though - problem drinkers are amazing at making it always someone else’s fault.

It is their fault and they also have an addiction problem. And it is also a societal wide problem.

There are many society wide problems, all with various trade offs and costs to ‘fix’. (I added quotes, because in most cases I suspect a real actual fix is impossible - merely moving things around into another category or changing how the underlying situation presents itself).

There are also many different individual choices one can make, with relative tradeoffs.

How would you rate illegal drug use/overdose deaths relative to DUIs for instance? What solutions (and related costs) do you think would be necessary to ‘solve’ the DUI problem? How about obesity? How about heart disease?

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db457.htm

You’ll find comments in this post complaining about getting DUIs in the most walkable cities in the world, and on bicycles too.

We could ban all alcohol - would that solve it? Historically, the answer is a solid no.

But luckily criminal records are not public in Germany so its not a life sentence.

So basically, as long as you’re not so impaired you’re an obvious danger to others you’ll probably get away with it, which might explain why it’s such a popular alternative to getting home from the pub.

No reason to continue punishing people forever, that is destructive for society. This ideology of as large punishment as possible is something I find off-putting.

One of the most to-the-book buddies I know is also the worst driver I know. He once had a gnarly accident where he flipped his car a few times because he had to look at his GPS briefly. I hate sitting in his car. He insists on always being the driver too because you can tell he finds driving overwhelming but thinks he’s actually good at it. Lol.

I have another buddy who does have a past DUI. He’s extremely coordinated and I have never felt unsafe in his car.

At the end of the day, if I had to choose someone to suspend their license forever, it would be my first buddy. I don’t care if he has a clean record. He simply was not gifted hand-eye coordination and is already a menace while sober.

I ain't no lawyer and I kind of opened a box I can't see the bottom of all on a sudden. More I skim the worse it seems and now I'm confused nobody seems to care who could do something about it given how abused I'm seeing people say it is. The public records and stuff I mean. Like would an apartment care if your federal misdemeanor or felony was littering at a national park or something, or just see "federal" and treat you like a wanted terrorist? Just leaving people to rot by chance seems fucked up to me

I have some sympathy for anyone discriminated against for something they did long ago but the solution here is to educate HR departments to only use relevant criteria when assessing candidates. Or, in other words, reset the social contract a little.

[0] Bonus rant: this fact is why I've always been consistently vocal that the people trying to put so much liability on self-driving vehicle operators that it'll slow down deployment need to take a long hard look at themselves. We need to get humans away from the wheel ASAP and if a couple of people die on the way there those are lives better spent than what we do now.

This doesn't require your record being kept forever, though. You're already dead or guilty.

> the solution here is to educate HR departments to only use relevant criteria when assessing candidates

This won't work. You don't decide what's relevant.

IN ADDITION to removal attempts, we SHOULD ALSO influence (regulation, societal pressure, etc) how HR/etc departments use data they find online about a person.

However, we should use the justice system to deliver the right punishment instead of condemning people to an extrajudicial, de facto life sentence in all cases. The US is too liberal with making information public, while in most countries it's almost impossible to know who had a DUI in the past.

Any cop can arrest you for DUI, with or without evidence. You get a mugshot, a public record, and a booking charge of "DUI".

Whether you get immediately released with charges dropped, or have to fight it in court and are later declared innocent or have the charges dropped, that initial public record and mugshot next to the words "DUI" now lives forever in various public archives.

I run a software shop, not a trucking company or airline. Whether you had a settled DUI in your past doesn’t change your ability to write code now, which is what I’m hiring you for.

Why would I care about an old DUI?

Beats me; I don’t.

Also any prior arrest record - DUI for example - can affect your permissions to work on projects with high security clearances and thus a factor that might not be relevant to small shop would at any rate be potentially relevant to large corporations who are the ones getting government contracts that require high security clearances.

A DUI is so serious it's impossible to expunge in most states. Yes, it is a life sentence in the sense. It will always come up again.

The record of the former is still public even if the charges get dropped or the arrest was unlawful. And will appear on web searches or be surfaced by all of the background checkers that HR uses.