Does Suspending a License Really Get People to Court?
Driver's license suspensions are often defended as a tool for accountability. North Carolina data shows it hasn't solved the problem and has lasting consequences.
In 2025, law enforcement across North Carolina made more than a million traffic stops. Most ended in a warning or no action at all. Of the citations that were issued, for things like a broken taillight, an expired registration, or driving a few miles over the limit, most never become a failure to appear (FTA) in court or a failure to comply (FTC) with a fine, and many are dismissed outright. And yet, as of January 2026, according to our data, an estimated 826,948 North Carolinians are living with a suspended driver's license tied to an unresolved FTA or FTC. (For background on how these suspensions work, see our earlier piece, The Problem of Debt-Based Driver's License Suspensions.)
A minor and often dismissible infraction can trigger a penalty that follows someone for years. The Wilson Center's Drivers License Suspension Dashboard estimates that roughly one in ten North Carolinians, disproportionately people of color, has a license suspended over an unpaid fine or a missed court date.
One of the most common defenses of this system is that suspension is necessary for accountability in failure-to-comply cases and, in failure-to-appear cases, as leverage to get people to show up in court. Without it, some argue, court dates would simply be ignored.
But what our data shows is that hundreds of thousands of people are still not showing up to court, even with the threat of license suspension.
People miss court dates because they can't get time off work, can't arrange childcare, can't find a ride, or sometimes, because they already know they have no way to pay the fines and fees waiting for them. The system treats nonpayment as a matter of will when it is most often a matter of means.
“You already know what’s going to happen when you go to court and you don’t have the money." — Diana Powell on why she missed her court date and received an FTA and driver's license suspension
Statewide, the median unresolved FTA has been pending for 1,544 days, more than four years. For FTCs, the median is 2,888 days, close to eight years. These aren't brief lapses that nudge someone back toward the courthouse. They are open-ended suspensions that stretch across much of a person's working life. And once the license is gone, the way back narrows, because it's hard to get to court, or to the job that would let you pay what you owe, without being able to legally drive.
This problem compounds. More than 257,000 North Carolinians currently carry multiple unresolved cases, and about half of those span more than one county, so a single missed date can multiply into suspensions a person may not even know they have. About 92,000 of them carry an unresolved failure to appear and an unresolved failure to pay at the same time. That overlap usually traces back to a single failed attempt to fix things, when someone goes to resolve a missed court date, can't afford the fine that comes due, and leaves with a second suspension on top of the first.
None of this is free for the courts. Every unresolved FTA and FTC is a case that stays open on a docket, and the people cycling through over administrative lapses are the same ones judges and prosecutors see again and again. The penalty meant to clear the path is helping to clog it.
Court date reminders and clearer citation forms have meaningfully reduced failures to appear without relying on license suspension. In New York City, redesigned summons forms and text reminders cut failures to appear by 13 to 21 percent and prevented an estimated 30,000 arrest warrants over three years. And since 2017, at least 25 states and D.C. have passed reforms curbing or eliminating debt-based license suspensions, part of a broader shift away from using driving privileges to enforce court debt or missed appearances.
To hear more from researchers, advocates, and people who have lived through these suspensions in North Carolina, read recaps from the Wilson Center's three-part Life on Hold series: how suspensions disrupt daily life, why people don't appear for court, and what other states are doing differently.