Published on April 30, 2020
Virginia will no longer suspend driver’s licenses because people owe court debt, thanks to legislation that was signed into law last week.
The state has been suspending hundreds of thousands of licenses each year, disproportionately those of African Americans and lower-income Virginians. “Payment systems are not sustainable because people are robbing from rent and from putting food on the table in order to make a payment,” Angela Ciolfi, executive director of the Legal Aid Justice Center, an advocacy organization that has sued Virginia for years over license suspensions, told the Political Report.
Suspensions compound underlying inequalities. In taking away many people’s main mode of transportation, they cut off access to work and make it harder to pay off debt in the first place.
“If someone is unemployed, or underemployed, unsheltered, or has a family, regularly paying fines and fees, much less paying them off, is extremely difficult,” Alexes Harris, a sociologist at the University of Washington who studies monetary sanctions, told the Political Report. “Adding the burden of suspending or revoking their driver’s licenses creates more disadvantages that have a cascading effect.”
Continue reading at The Appeal.
Originally written by Daniel Nichanian for The Appeal.