Challenges to Employment: Fines, Fees, and License Suspensions

This brief provides an overview of the practice of suspending driver’s licenses due to unpaid fines or fees in the United States and the effects that license suspension can have on people’s involvement with the criminal legal system and their ability to secure employment. This brief demonstrates how license suspension due to unpaid fines and fees makes it harder for people to achieve economic mobility.

Those affected by the practice of license suspension due to unpaid fines or fees in the United States have suffered the resulting effects on employment and earnings, involvement in the criminal legal system, and overall social and economic mobility. These effects are felt the most by non-White and low-income communities, who often bear the brunt of policing practices that make a priori­ty of imposing fines and fees. Many programs like He Got Up! work to help people reinstate their licenses and pay off legal debts across the country. The reinstate­ment processes can be incredibly complex and may require participants to navigate and interact with multiple government agencies and offices (sometimes in different municipalities), each of which has its own expectations to meet. He Got Up! participants told MDRC that the program helped them navigate this difficult and time-consuming process.

However, the scale of the problem remains vast: hundreds of municipalities rely on fines and fees to generate revenue and continue to impose sanctions such as license suspension on those unable to pay. Future research on the labor force participation of people with low incomes should consider debt (for example, debt from unpaid fines and fees) as an important variable that can shape a person’s ability to achieve economic security and mobility.

The BEES project team drafted this brief drawing on information gathered from a literature review exploring the broader policy context regarding license suspension for unpaid fines and fees and by collaborating with the He Got Up! program to document the process by which eligible people work toward having their licenses reinstated and to reveal potential challenges for par­ticipants. The BEES project team also conducted interviews with three program participants in summer of 2021 to learn about how license suspensions affect people’s day-to-day lives.

Leiva, Niko, and Emily Marano. 2022. “Challenges to Employment: Fines, Fees, and License Suspensions.” OPRE Report 2022-290. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.