Kansas apparently still hasn’t gotten a handle on how to reduce repeated drunken driving offenses.

A study released late last year by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration ranked Kansas 10th in the nation in alcohol-related deaths per mile driven in 2002. That was a significant jump from a ranking of 29th in 1998.

Keeping drunken drivers off the road is a difficult problem. A story in Friday’s Journal-World studied the case of a Eudora man who was being sentenced in Douglas County District Court for his eighth DUI conviction in the past 20 years. His, unfortunately, is far from an isolated case. Last week, alone, sentencings were scheduled in Douglas County for at least three people with four or more DUI convictions.

How do we stop this cycle?

Some would say penalties should be stiffer. Given the threat drunken drivers pose to others, it does seem that a maximum sentence of one year in the county jail, regardless of how many offenses a person has had, isn’t severe enough. The only way to ensure these drivers aren’t out on the road endangering others is to lock them up.

But not only is there not enough prison space to house every drunken driver, anything short of a life sentence doesn’t really address the problem. Simply locking someone up won’t keep them from offending again once they get out.

Perhaps the threat of a longer prison sentence would prompt someone to seek help with a drinking problem before racking up additional offenses, but it doesn’t seem to have worked for the man with eight convictions. His attorney’s contention at sentencing that his client “knows what kind of trouble he’s in and will maintain sobriety the rest of his life,” falls a little flat after eight convictions spanning 20 years. The judge was right to give him the maximum sentence and tack on additional time for driving on a suspended license and violating probation.

Judges can suspend drivers licenses, but that obviously doesn’t keep people from driving. Requiring treatment is another option, but that may have no effect if a person isn’t ready to make changes in his or her life.

A representative of Mothers Against Drunk Driving told the Journal-World last week that penalties for drunken driving were stiff enough and that incorporating offenders into a system of “supervision, probation, treatment, job training, whatever” was the most promising route. Maybe so, but with the closing of state mental hospitals and community facilities already straining to take up the slack, what are the chances the state would invest enough in alcohol treatment programs to handle this difficult problem?

It would be nice to offer a direction for the state in dealing with this issue, but the answers are far from obvious. The fact that Kansas is 10th in the nation in this dubious ranking may indicate that other states are having more success than Kansas at battling this problem. If so, Kansas officials should waste no time in studying what those states are doing and seeing how it can be applied here.