Drivers License Suspensions Slamming the Working Poor for No Particular Good Reason in Florida

Tampa Bay Times columnist Steve Bousquet
yesterday touches on a subject I wrote about here at
Reason last month in my article “Petty
Law Enforcement vs. the Poor“: the way enforcement of laws
relating to traffic and parking and moving on the streets, as
people or in vehicles, can be heavyhanded and damaging beyond what
the “crimes” in question should reasonably impose on most citizens,
starting from something seemingly “minor” to something pretty much
life-wrecking.

Bousquet writes on how quick his home state of Florida is to
impose the potentially crippling, to the working poor, punishment
of driver’s license suspension. He hits you upfront with what that
too-often means to the punished:

The state of Florida is in the business of driving people into
poverty.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to House Speaker Will
Weatherford, a Republican from Wesley Chapel, who couldn’t believe
how often the state suspends drivers’ licenses: It happened to
nearly 700,000 people last year…..

“If you go look at the data, they didn’t pay a fine,”
Weatherford said. “They forgot to show up in court. They didn’t pay
their child support. There’s this snowball effect. They lose their
driver’s license. Now they can’t get to work. They get pulled over
on a suspended driver’s license. Now they go to jail. Now they owe
$4,000. It creates poverty. It holds people down.”

A total of 685,489 drivers in Florida had their licenses
suspended in the fiscal year that ended last June. The law allows
for a “business purposes only” license in some cases, but not for
people who lose their licenses because they failed to pay
fines.

And 167,000 of those suspensions had nothing to do with
driving.

Failure to pay child support is grounds for suspension. So is a
drug-related conviction, failure to appear in court on a worthless
check charge and truancy by a minor. There are hundreds of kids
under age 16 in Florida whose future licenses have been suspended
because they habitually skip school, even though their licenses
don’t yet exist.

A new report by the Legislature’s research unit, the Office of
Program Policy Analysis and Government Accountability, found that
more people received nondriving-related suspensions in the past
year for failure to pay court costs than for any other
reason….

As I wrote in my piece, it’s a steady pattern of severe damage
to the lives of the least well off in America that strangely gets
little attention from most poverty activists and academics, perhaps
because the solution is for the state to do less rather than do
more.