The Southern Subculture of Drinking and Driving

Book excerpt: First published in 1996. The Southern Subculture of Drinking and Driving is part of the Criminal Justice series. Volumes in the Current Issues in Criminal Justice series focus on scholarship, original thought and research, and readability. This one is no different. Julian B. Roebuck and Komanduri S. Murty have produced a volume that will be of vital interest to those who study and create policy on drunken driving one of the more enduring social problems of the past two decades. The volume has two major components that make it unique in the drunken driving literature. First, Roebuck and Murty focus on drunken drivers themselves and, through the use of a large dataset, add to our knowledge of that group of people by describing their characteristics. Second, and perhaps more important, Roebuck and Murty delve into the phenomenology of the drunken driver through a lengthy interview process.