Welcome to Sobering Up!

First, I’d like to welcome you to Sobering Up: A blog about drunk driving, alcohol addiction, and criminal justice. While we are a corporation, and this is a blog, our objective is to be anything but a traditional corporate blog. As a company, we reached a noteworthy milestone in 2011: 200,000 monitored offenders. That’s more than 18 million monitored days, 800 million alcohol tests performed, and literally billions of pieces of data. We’ve talked to thousands of judges, probation executives, attorneys, and sheriffs. We’ve sat in thousands of courtrooms. We’ve testified before congressional bodies. We’ve diligently followed the many unexpected and often unanticipated nuances involved with our industry and its issues.

As we reach this milestone, we feel like it’s an appropriate time to weigh in with our own perspective. In a world filled with an almost endless list of government agencies, special interests, nonprofits, congressional caucuses, and individual advocates all talking about, working on, or studying the DUI issue, we feel that as a for-profit company (in a world that doesn’t always respect for-profit entities), we have a unique, if not important, perspective. And we’ve earned a place at the table.

Sobering Up is our venue for sharing that perspective, and we invite any and all of you to participate. Yes, we will review all blog responses before they are posted. But be sure to take a look at our Blog Guidelines before you dismiss this corporate blog as just another mouthpiece for PR and marketing. Because we are committed to managing a blog that engages readers and followers, and we are committed to helping to drive a bigger conversation by encouraging those who visit to do the same.

As long as your post falls within what we think are the reasonable guidelines we’ve established (you haven’t used inappropriate language or images, you aren’t stealing anyone else’s intellectual property, etc.), then we will post your responses and engage when it’s appropriate. We’ve identified a few key staff bloggers with different areas of expertise, and we’ve invited a panel of respected thought leaders throughout the U.S. to participate, as well.  We know we have to prove ourselves, so please be sure to give us the opportunity.