We often listen to the police scanner here in the newsroom, and have been shocked … though perhaps not surprised … to hear the dispatcher telling a police officer, “Eight priors, two felony” or something similar at a traffic stop.

What they’re referring to is previous OUI arrests.

A new law that goes into effect this week will allow more than the police in the field to know who’s got multiple priors. It will allow a judge to know, and to take all of those priors into account in sentencing.

More than 150,000 drivers in Maine have had a drunk driving arrest in their lifetimes. Of those, 47,581 have had offenses in the last 10 years. More than 42,000 have had more than one drunk driving violation over the last 30 years, however, and 724 have had six or more over the last 30 years.

Under current law, if the felony offense was more than 10 years ago, the judge can’t use that to consider a harsher sentence. A drunken driving offense becomes a felony when someone is seriously hurt or killed or when a driver is convicted of drunk driving for the third time in a 10-year period.

But as of Friday, a judge can use the whole of a person’s driving record, including old felony drunk driving convictions, to determine a sentence. Repeat offenses carry increasingly severe penalties. These may be higher fines, longer license suspension periods and, after the first offense, jail time.

The law also boosts the license suspension period for a person who has one OUI in a given 10-year period from 90 to 150 days. If the person has two OUI offenses within 10 years that suspension is active for three years, increasing to six years for three offenses and eight years for four or more offenses.

Maine had 49 accidents that resulted in deaths in 2012, the last year for which numbers are currently available. That was 30 percent of all traffic accident deaths in the state that year. That number was a huge jump, compared to the year before, when only 17 percent of deaths were related to drinking, and 23 lost their lives to drunk driving.

Secretary of State Matt Dunlap said that 3,976 people were convicted of driving under the influence in 2013, but just 131 of those elevated to the level of felonies.

The increased penalties for driving under the influence are a good start to making Maine’s roads safer. Now, however, it’s time for the state to up the ante with those using their mobile devices while driving by creating similar felony provisions as are in place with operating under the influence.

Driving under the influence and driving while texting often result in the same sort of road behaviors … weaving, failure to notice stopped traffic, running off the road. The end results are also tragically often the same. Maine had several texting related deaths before and after it became illegal at the end of 2013. While Maine has a fairly robust anti-texting law on the books now, making texting the equivalent of drunk driving by adding felony provisions when someone is injured or killed, or when a person is convicted multiple times, may give the texters greater pause for thought before using that phone in the car.