How'd the life in jail thing pan out for the war on drugs?
People are already risking their actual life with distracted driving. Many and perhaps all of us know someone who died, killed someone, was injured, or injured someone else because of distracted driving. There is already a threat associated with the event. They could literally die. There is no greater threat. Adding fines or jail does not increase the threat and so provides no further disincentive against the behavior. I've already agreed that there may be some reduction in the behavior, but at what cost?
I do not want companies and governments to watch every moment of every driver either passively or actively using either machines or humans in the name of potentially protecting me from a distracted driver due to the increased likelihood that they go to jail. I do not want companies recording personal conversations of all drivers always just in case they happen to not check their blind spot. It would make me as a cyclist feel bad knowing that I've subjected millions to continual surveillance for my safety. The camera would have to be on at all times in order to detect the distracted driving in order to alert the driver. It could, I suppose, take pictures instead of recording video but then the detection would not function as well. It could all be done locally to the vehicle and never uploaded. If uploaded, there could be a deletion policy with strict access controls, but there is so much money to be made with recording and saving the data to sell to insurers and ad companies and machine learning companies and...
In the US alone you're asking that consumers be forced to spend millions of dollars between the added cost of the R&D, cameras, and storage (and more if you want it local to the vehicle) in order to be subjected to hundreds of billions of hours of surveillance annually (assuming all cars have cameras on all the time). I do not want to live in a world in which we speed-run having our every thought and action recorded in the off-chance we do something wrong. I do not believe that common citizens should exist under constant scrutiny. If there is life after death and I die by the hands of another I will not ever once think "gee, I wish there'd been a camera to save me"
While we're adding continual video monitoring, why don't we add a few other just-in-case protections? Why shouldn't every vehicle have breath alcohol ignition interlock devices? Who could object other than precisely those we wish to prevent from driving? And we've already got cameras on the outside, why shouldn't we make drivers perform a safety inspection to make sure their lights, blinkers, and hazards are working? Surely it's no burden to ensure the safety of your fellow drivers? And of course there's no legitimate reason for a civilian vehicle to travel over the speed limit, and we've already got on-board GPS, so why shouldn't all vehicles have GPS speed governors? Sure, we all like speeding, but that's not fair to all victims so we'll just go ahead and eliminate that as a possibility.
While we're doing the cameras, why stop at the inside of a vehicle? Why stop on the outside of your door? We could have a nice gentle dinging noise to remind people that the domestic violence they are committing is currently being recorded. Millions of crimes are committed inside homes, and many murders happen in homes. People are wrongly convicted of crimes that didn't happen (where the 'victim' really did just fall down the stairs), after all. A single camera could save those wrongfully accused from wrongful imprisonment! What a deal!
We have the ability to drastically reduce all sorts of crimes. All it costs is treating everyone like a criminal at all times et voilà!