Driver License Suspensions are Modern Debtor's Prisons

I want to highlight the issue of driver license suspensions in light of Arizona ending the practice for unpaid debts. This is one of those policy issues that falls in this uncanny valley bad enough to be a serious detriment, but not so serious that the general public will care much.

To briefly summarize, for the vast majority of places in the US, you need a personal vehicle for transportation. You also need a valid driver's license to drive this vehicle. Simultaneously, your license can be suspended for a laundry list of reasons, including unpaid traffic tickets. Driving with a suspended license is enforced by (get this) more fines, or sometimes, criminal prosecution and imprisonment.

I'm not exaggerating the latter. I first encountered the issue while working on a research project examining statewide court records, and we were able to estimate that roughly 20% of all criminal prosecutions were for 'driving with a suspended license' (DWLS for short). I want to acknowledge that sometimes a license gets suspended because an individual has 5 DUIs on their record, but the vast overwhelming majority of suspensions were for unpaid traffic tickets and unpaid child support. I then saw the impact of my research when I first started working as a public defender on misdemeanors, where literally 40-60% of cases filed in lower courts were for DWLS. It was an agonizing and dizzying display of waste in my opinion, because the prosecutor's office hated the law, but not enough to stop enforcing it completely, so we'd waste hours and hours of courtroom time dealing with criminally prosecuting random people with a crime, getting them scared shitless enough to show to court ("Am I going to jail???" was a common question for these virgin babies), only for the charges to get reduced to a fine at first appearance.

The most egregious example I witnessed was a guy with clear mental health issues who was arrested and booked into jail solely for a DWLS. He had a breakdown in jail and started throwing feces all over his cell. His entire family showed up to court, and he could only be brought out restrained on a gurney and in a turtle suit. Problem is, you can't prosecute someone when they're legally incompetent, so the next step would be to ask for a competency evaluation. The defense attorney basically shamed the prosecutor into dropping the case by saying "You seriously want me to ask for a psychological evaluation for a DWLS?"

To be clear, but he was not arrested because he was mentally ill. His license was suspended for unpaid fines and did not appear to have anything to do with mental illness. He also was not arrested for any dangerous driving, the cop behind him just happened to have an automated license plate reader that would check the status of registered owners and pull up their license photo (so the cop can compare it to the current driver). He was quickly released after the charges were dismissed.

The modal scenario involved someone getting a traffic ticket, they either never get notice or forget about paying it, eventually their license gets suspended for unpaid fines, and then they get pulled over unaware their license was suspended, except now they're charged with a crime. The judge I was working in front of was of a similar mind to me, and they would routinely just wipe people's debt clean.

I grant that driving without liability insurance, for example, is irresponsible, but that's not the same thing as having a suspended license. Most reasonably assume that if someone is too poor to pay traffic tickets, they're also too poor to pay for insurance, but this actually did not bear out at all in my experience. There were definitely a score of people who would routinely get "DWLS + No Insurance" tickets who would just keep driving, but the vast majority of DWLS defendants had valid insurance. And here's the other thing that was wild: driving without valid insurance was not considered a moving violation, so not paying that $500 fine did not suspend your license! It didn't make sense to me either. Driving w/o insurance is actually one area where I would support suspending someone's license over.

Further, it's literally impossible for everyone to drive perfectly all the time. People take their driver's license test once as a teenager and then coast through life via automatic renewals. There are a number of niche rules most drivers don't know about. E.g. In a lot of states, every intersection is an unmarked crosswalk where cars must yield to pedestrians. Also, you are required to use your turn signal at least 100 feet before an intersection. Etc etc. Because of the number of possible violations, and because of the lack of rigorous licensing scheme, and because of the explicitly recognized discretion that cops have, whether or not you are "caught" for bad driving is significantly up to chance.

The whole policy just never made any sense to me, and it seemed like the very definition of capriciousness. If someone is too poor to pay fines, how does it make sense to take away their ability to drive to work? I saw a steady stream of people who accumulated thousands and thousands of dollars in unpaid ticket fines and they just shrugged with "what the fuck do you expect me to do? not drive to work?". Ostensibly, the logic was perhaps that if you put enough of a squeeze on, some people will be motivated to pay, and maybe that was enough of an incentive to warrant the institution.

For those wondering how someone could continue driving, unaware that their license has been suspended, that’s partly because not a lot of attention is paid to ensure mailed notices go where they’re supposed to go.

I've been involved in litigation around the specific procedures that the central state agencies use in sending mail. I'll stay vague and just say they're lacking. They have to process a ton of mail, and they only apply the highest scrutiny to what they consider Very Important. License suspension is not considered Very Important, but only Important, so it doesn't have as many quality assurance checks as the top level, and it definitely never ever requires signature confirmation. One example of a check that is lacking is an audit at the beginning and end of the process. This means that if two notices get double-stuffed into a single envelope, or if a notice falls through the conveyor belt, no one would know. They actually tried to study the failure rate, and they did so by surveying workplace injury claimants (basically, recipients that know they're going to receive a letter, and want to receive that letter), and they identified tens of thousands of missing letters.

So mail gets lost sometimes. Poorer people also tend to have very unstable housing and either are homeless from time to time, or just change residences a lot.

There is also some parallel with how municipalities (like Ferguson MO) had their budgets structured, relying extensively on deputizing law enforcement was de facto tax collectors. Part of what the DOJ highlighted when examining Ferguson and areas around it was the resentment that would build up over years of this arrangement, especially since there were plenty of examples of (typically white) people pulling strings with court staff to get their fees waived. There's no reason to trust law enforcement if they're responsible for putting you into debt, and then also responsible for jailing for not paying that debt.

To be clear, I'm not advocating for no traffic enforcement at all. I just find little sense in the structure of "pay money, and if you don't, pay more money, and if you don't, go to jail". I know enough grindingly poor people to understand how devastating having to fork over $100 can be, whereas many would barely blink. One idea would be using a 'points' system for driver's license infractions, that way it at least hits rich and poor alike. Except for the issue of insurance, I don't see any public safety purpose of preventing people from driving because they have unpaid fines.

I do think that traffic fines are bullshit for a number of reasons. Paying a fine doesn't make you a safer driver, so it doesn't make sense to me to attach the negative consequences to whether or not you pay the fine rather than whether or not you did the bad thing. This is why I would favor a strictly points-based system where your ability to pay doesn't automatically absolve you of the consequences of your bad driving. If you implement license suspension under a points system, at least the consequence is much more correlated to someone's record on driving, rather than the material wealth they're able to muster.