So, this is a reasonable thing to be confused and frustrated about. It's worth remembering that the underlying philosophy of justice, crime, and punishment isn't actually something a society agrees upon. Ask five different people a question about the law, the courts, or the prisons and you'll get five different answers. And the system we get out of that is a hodgepodge of extremely path dependent features based upon who was in control of what levers of power at the time a given law was passed or a given punishment decided to be cruel and unusual (or not).

Broadly speaking, there are two independent axes the judicial system is trying to satisfy:

- punitive punishment. There are some actions that cannot be undone and some catastrophes for which there is no "making whole" the victim. Our system factors in a certain amount of eye for an eye retribution in these cases that dates all the way back to Hammurabi. If you're looking for a justification based on societal structure and survival and not just "vibes" (and make no mistake, there's a huge amount of just vibes in the way law, crime, and punishment come about)... It is believed a general understanding amongst the people that committing irrevocable transgressions on their neighbors will cause society to inflict transgressions upon them keeps the society from degenerating into infliction of individual violence on each other in the common case. Does it work? Depends on who you ask. But that's the idea, at least from the Machiavellian "stable society" standpoint. In that context, it doesn't matter if Reiser completely overhauls his philosophy of life in jail; he took something that he cannot give back, he took something no one can give back, and a certain amount of punishment is necessary to inform everyone else this is not acceptable ("thus always to the enemies of the country," etc).

- rehabilitation and rebuilding of trust. We humans broadly speaking divide other humans into two categories: those who would never and those who would. Certain transgressions bump a person from the would-never into the would category, and that opens a fissure that can never be closed. The fissure can be diminished by the transgressor demonstrating that they understand why that's unacceptable and providing reasons for the public to believe they will never commit that transgression a second time. Under this theory, crime commission is contextual; if a person can demonstrate that they will never be in the context again that would cause them to commit the crime, a certain amount of trust can be reestablished.

And here we get to the question of why drunk driving is treated less severely than, say, premeditated murder. As an individual, it's very hard to guard against premeditated murder. And people premeditating murder look like everybody else; It's hard to generate signifiers that would rebuild trust if somebody does such a thing. So the state has a large interest in discouraging it via "the olde ways," because the state has a hard time detecting it coming or defending the victims. In contrast, crimes committed under the influence of mind-alterers we generally feel would be something the transgressor would not do if the influence were removed. It's a lot easier to reestablish the trust gap in theory if somebody who drives drunk swears they will never drink again.

... That having been said, in practice, I totally agree with you. I think the numbers on drunk driving recidivism are ridiculous and it is completely unacceptable to maintain the status quo trust model on this issue; drunk driving should be an immediate revocation of the ability to use a licensed vehicle for life without extraordinary circumstances (on the order of pardon from the governor) to allow someone to retest for a license. We treat pilot licenses thusly; we should treat vehicle licenses with similar scrutiny.

... Problem is, in the US at least, we've built a society so heavily dependent upon cars in most of the country that doing this in the general case would be a sentence worse than the location constraints we put on sex offenders, and there's an upper limit on the state's capacity to actually enforce a law.