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The 2022 bill-signing season marked a turning point in California’s approach to improving the economic and social mobility of its disparate residents. As Governor Gavin Newsom signed and blocked some 550 bills, news outlets and online commentators buzzed about new policies that extended state ID cards to immigrants, lifted restrictions on the development of multi-family dwellings and removed parking requirements that prioritized dwelling vehicles over people. .
Under SB1055, the California Department of Motor Vehicles can no longer automatically revoke a low-income parent’s non-commercial driver’s license if they fall behind on their child support payments. The law reforms a counterproductive licensing policy but fails to repeal it. Instead, it sets a floor on those eligible to lose their license, which protects some indigent parents but does not protect arrears who earn more than 70% of their county’s median income.
In a society largely based on driving, a license suspension is a terrible punishment. Any parent who loses a license must resort to California’s often unreliable public transit systems, expensive ride-hailing services, or risk a misdemeanor for driving with a suspended license. They can quickly find themselves without a job and, predictably, are even less able to pay their child support.
Most drivers are familiar with the parts of the Motor Vehicle Code that relate to highway safety. It may come as a surprise that you can lose your license for child food offending. This is just one of many license-related penalties that have less to do with traffic rules than with collecting payments. This system typically traps low-income drivers who cannot afford the simplest escape route: simply pay what the government has charged them.
Because states set driver’s license policies, suspensions vary across the country. Child support suspensions are unique in that states must enforce them or risk losing federal financial assistance for welfare programs and enforcement.
While it is entirely reasonable – most would say necessary – for the state to apply some sort of sanction to child support payments, that sanction should be rationally connected to the crime. If policy makers intend to collect revenue, driving penalties are likely ineffective. How, then, did we come to rely so heavily on license suspensions in the United States to enforce separate traffic safety violations?
In short, the more essential driving becomes during the 20th century, the more punitive a suspension can be. And technology has made it possible to apply suspension statutes on a larger scale. In the 1970s, government agencies began digitizing their databases; identifying offenders has become much simpler than updating and sharing records through paperwork and snail mail. A police officer could now check almost instantly if a driver they had arrested had a suspended warrant or license.
Database sharing enabled mission creep. Now that driver’s license records could be linked to child support records, legislatures could require the DMV to identify, notify and suspend the licenses of overdue parents. In the 1990s, as welfare reform gained popularity, policymakers turned to license suspensions to deter and punish a range of “broken windows” crimes, including truancy and graffiti. President Bill Clinton asked Congress in 1995 to require states to suspend driver’s licenses and professional licenses for failing to pay child support. The DMV was now in a position to collect the debt, rather than just provide road safety.
Not only were there more ways to lose your license, but the punishment for being caught driving without a license was more severe – a risk many suspended drivers were willing to take. Courts, on the other hand, have treated driving as a privilege rather than an essential form of mobility. As long as a suspension serves a legitimate state interest, the courts allow suspensions to be used to punish, deter and compel people.
A bureaucratic procedure once established is difficult to wrest, and license suspensions are particularly prevalent. Licensing penalties affect broad swaths of the 29 sections of California’s legislative code. Child support suspensions affect approximately 140,000 licensed drivers in California. Most of these drivers are probably low income; the majority (over 80%) of California parents ordered to pay child support earn less than $40,000 a year or report no income. More broadly, it is estimated that more than 7 million Americans have lost their license for failing to pay a legal or administrative debt.
These suspension policies are retrograde. When drivers run a red light, chances are they won’t be punished. In contrast, parents who could obey all traffic rules may lose their license when the DMV is notified that they have missed a child support payment.
The SB1055 takes an important step in changing this status quo, but it doesn’t go far enough. No state can simply abolish child support suspensions without reform at the federal level. They can, however, better prioritize license suspensions for reckless driving, rather than nonpayment.
Miriam Pinski is a research analyst at the Shared Use Mobility Center. She holds a doctorate in urban planning from UCLA.