South Dakota's 24-7 Sobriety Program

"The initial program evaluation showed big effects on future drunk driving by program participants (down 50 percent over the following two years). Subsequent studies by the RAND Drug Policy Research Center showed that for the entire population — not just participants — 24/7 Sobriety reduces drunk driving arrests by 12 percent. It also reduces arrests for domestic violence by 9 percent, even though domestic violence charges are rarely the reason an offender is put on the program.

The new study by RAND’s Nancy Nicosia, Beau Kilmer, and Paul Heaton examines total-population, all-cause mortality — it drops an average of 4 percent after a county adopts the program. Even though most of the offenders are men, the lives saved seem to concentrate among women."