No Driving for You!
America’s cruel way to punish poor debtors:
take away their driver’s license
Damian Stinnie is one of the millions of people in America who have had their driver’s licenses suspended because of unpaid debt. Despite spending much of his childhood in foster care, Stinnie graduated from high school with a 3.9 grade point average. While seeking work after losing his first low-paying job, he received four traffic violations and racked up $1,000 in fines and costs.
Because he was unable to pay the full amount within 30 days, his license was automatically suspended. As is routine in many states, including Virginia, where Stinnie lived, no one asked him if he could afford to pay. So, like three-quarters of those suspended, Stinnie lost his license essentially because he was poor, not because of the infractions themselves.
At that point, Stinnie joined the millions of Americans who face the dilemma of getting to work, taking a sick child to the hospital, or buying groceries while risking penalties for driving with a suspended license.
Needless to say, many people take the risk because they have no choice; at least 75 percent of those who have their licenses suspended keep driving. So the debtor may be arrested again for driving without a license, this time to be incarcerated and certainly to be hit with another set of fines and fees.
Across the United States, many jurisdictions use this cruel method to coerce payment from people who owe fines and fees to the state. State and local governments do this in large part to balance their books in the face of dwindling tax revenues, heedless of the fact that it makes it much more difficult for the working poor to get to the jobs they need to pay off their debts.
People with means can often forestall suspensions by paying fines and fees, but those without means are trapped in the vicious circle of repeated suspensions and ever deepening debt.
California is the leader and all-time champion in taking away driver’s licenses. As of 2015, more than four million Californians had lost their driver’s licenses for some kind of fine that they did not pay on time, often for an infraction that had nothing to do with driving. That is more than one out of six adult Californians.
The use of suspensions accelerated during the Great Recession: as government revenues went down, fines and fees went up, courts pushed harder on collections, and more people could not pay because they had lost their jobs—so now they lost their licenses, too.
People of color paid the highest price. In Oakland, where Black people make up less than a third of the city’s population, 60 percent of those who lose their licenses are African American. Likewise, African Americans account for six percent of San Francisco’s population but comprised 70.4 percent of clients who came to an arrest and conviction clinic convened by the San Francisco Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights in 2014. Statewide, African Americans are 60 percent more likely than non-Hispanic whites to lose their licenses, and Hispanics are 20 percent more likely.
Other states also suspend driver’s licenses with abandon. Florida has about 700,000 residents who have lost their licenses, Texas about 1.2 million. When people in those states have unmanageable debts due to repeated arrests for driving on a suspended license, the next step is jail.
Florida suspends licenses without any inquiry as to whether the person is able to pay the underlying debt, and it sends people to prison for five years when they have been arrested three times for driving on a suspended license. Florida’s Chief Justice Jorge Labarga said at a conference I attended at the White House, “Florida loves to suspend driver’s licenses. If you spit on the street you lose your license.”
As in California, suspensions are rarely confined to traffic infractions. Montana suspends licenses for unpaid student loans. Iowa suspends for public drunkenness, with no car involved. Other states suspend for writing bad checks, graffiti, and littering.
In 2012, Tennessee added a category of suspensions for non-traffic-related offenses and now has 90,000 suspensions in that category to go with its 170,000 suspensions for traffic-related offenses.
A study by Robert Eger III of the Naval Post-Graduate School in Monterey, California, reported that at least 18 states suspend for not paying the fines on non-driving traffic violations, adding up to 40 percent of all license suspensions nationally.
A real catch-22
The story of license suspensions in the U.S. reveals the extent of the injury states are willing to inflict on low-income people in order to balance their books. For many people, there is no way out of the trap of not being able to work because you have had your license suspended, and not being able to get your license reinstated because you can’t work and pay your fines.
For some, the cycle of exorbitant fines, license suspension, inability to work, further fines and incarceration is a lifelong sentence. Though there have been glimmers of reform, including in states such as California, license suspension remains one of the cruelest and most widespread ways that America criminalizes its poor.
This excerpt originally appeared in Not a Crime to Be Poor: The Criminalization of Poverty in America by Peter Edelman, published by The New Press.
Peter Edelman is the Carmack Waterhouse Professor of Law and Public Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, where he teaches constitutional law and poverty law and is faculty director of the Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality.
—The Guardian, November 10, 2017