Recap: From Punishment to Prevention

Moderator and Panelists

• Destiny Carter is a Senior Advocacy and Campaigns Strategist at the Fines and Fees Justice Center (FFJC), where she supports national and state-based campaigns to eliminate unjust fines and fees. She previously managed criminal justice advocacy at Arnold Ventures and holds a J.D. from Case Western Reserve University School of Law.
• Brie Sillery is FFJC's New Mexico Policy Advocate, supporting the state's advisory board of people with lived experience and helping organize the coalition behind New Mexico's 2023 reform.
• Leah Nelson is a Senior Research Associate at the Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama (PARCA). She began her career in journalism and has also worked on post-conviction appeals for people on Alabama's Death Row.
• Rubina Mustafa is a Senior Staff Attorney at the Detroit Justice Center, where she helps people overcome barriers created by poverty and incarceration and leads driver's license restoration clinics in Michigan.
• Vittorio Nastasi is the Director of Criminal Justice Policy at the Reason Foundation, providing research and technical assistance to lawmakers on fines and fees and reentry barriers.

Why End Debt-Based License Suspensions?

Destiny Carter opened by framing the stakes: 86% of Americans drive to work, and taking away a license over unpaid fines or a missed court date strips people of the very means they'd use to pay the debt, costing an average of $12,700 in lost annual wages per suspended person. Public safety suffers too, as officers and courts cycle the same people through the system over administrative violations instead of addressing actual crimes.

Comprehensive reform, Carter explained, ends automatic suspensions for missed court dates or unpaid fines, applies retroactively to lift old suspensions, ends registration holds, and eliminates reinstatement fees. As of 2026, 26 states and D.C. have passed some type of reform since 2017, but only four have achieved comprehensive reform across these dimensions.

The North Carolina Picture

In North Carolina, licenses are automatically suspended for unpaid fines or missed court dates, creating a closed loop: people can't drive to the court dates they're missing or to the jobs that would let them pay. Almost 900,000 North Carolinians are currently suspended, with an average suspension length of 4.5 years. Because 95% of the state's workers drive to work, forgone earnings for affected residents are estimated between $6.5 and $8.8 billion.

The "cycle" of suspension

Rubina Mustafa described the cascading pattern. A single missed appearance generates a suspension, and subsequent tickets pile on before the first can be resolved. "People are chasing these tickets for years or sometimes decades," she said. Most underlying infractions, such as expired registration, broken taillights, and lapsed insurance, map directly onto poverty. Michigan cleared many of these as triggers for immediate license suspension as part of its reforms, offering enormous relief.

Vittorio Nastasi pointed to reinstatement mechanisms as a key variable in how long suspensions persist. In Georgia, even after a 2022 legislative change gave judges discretion to allow driving earlier in the process of rectifying a missed court date, administrative backlogs meant people could still wait months to be legally allowed back on the road.

What other states are doing differently

A central focus of the discussion was how states are moving away from suspension-based enforcement and toward systems that encourage compliance instead of punishing noncompliance. The panel clarified that these reforms target administrative suspensions, meaning failure to appear (FTA) and failure to pay (FTP), not suspensions tied to dangerous driving. Four themes ran across the state efforts:

1. Ending debt-based suspensions. New Mexico (Senate Bill 47, 2023) and Michigan (HB 5846–5852 and HB 6235, 2020) have both eliminated license suspensions for unpaid fines and fees, recognizing that the practice traps people in cycles of debt rather than resolving the underlying violation.
2. Creating off-ramps for failure to appear. Rather than suspending automatically, several states now build in chances to reengage. Alabama's SB 154 (2023) raises the threshold, requiring more than one missed court date or more than two missed payments before a suspension can take effect. Michigan's 2020 package went further, requiring courts to offer additional opportunities to appear before imposing penalties, and a companion bill, SB 1046, barred custody arrests for most nonviolent misdemeanors in favor of appearance tickets. Georgia's HB 926 (2024), the Second Chance Workforce Act, auto-reinstates a license as soon as someone contacts the court to reschedule, without waiting for the case to resolve.
3. Removing reinstatement barriers. Nastasi described reinstatement fees as a "final paywall" that keeps people suspended even after resolving the underlying issue. Georgia's HB 926 addresses this directly by strengthening the state's pauper's affidavit into a full fee waiver for indigent drivers, and several other states have reduced or waived these fees outright.
4. Using reminders and flexibility instead of punishment. Simple interventions like text message reminders, flexible scheduling, and clearer communication can meaningfully improve court attendance rates without any enforcement escalation.

The politics of getting these bills passed mattered as much as the policy design. Brie Sillery described the lead-up to New Mexico's 2023 reform, when 88% of the state's suspensions were for FTA or FTP. She pointed to a pivotal moment when Chief Public Defender Bennett Bauer testified about his own experience getting caught in this cycle after a calendar mix-up. "It was an empowering testimony," she said.

Leah Nelson emphasized taking opposing arguments seriously: "The big question was, why do you want dangerous drivers on the road? The easy answer is, we don't."  In Alabama, advocates pointed to the existing points system as the real tool for addressing unsafe driving, and leaned on the economic case that suspensions were costing the state more than they collected.

Lessons from implementation

Passing reform is only the first step, and panelists emphasized that implementation challenges can determine whether reform succeeds.

Sillery described negotiating a three-month reinstatement timeline with New Mexico's Motor Vehicle Division by framing the lift as a one-time administrative investment that would reduce their ongoing workload. Mustafa explained why the Detroit Justice Center launched restoration clinics: “good legislation doesn't automatically translate into public understanding, and coordinated outreach across state agencies, private firms, and volunteers is essential.” Nastasi also noted that sharing real experiences of people trying to work, care for families, or navigate the system helped reframe the issue from noncompliance to structural barriers.

Asked whether states build on each other's work, Nelson said yes, but with a caveat. Legal systems are idiosyncratic, and what works politically in one state can sink a bill in another. "Aim for outcomes, not processes," she said.

Note: This webinar was for educational purposes only, and the views expressed by panelists do not represent the institutional position of Duke University.

Co-sponsored by the NC Alliance for Safe Transportation, Independent Insurers of NC, Operation Gateway, Inc., Advocate Collaborate Educate (ACE), Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC) of Rocky Mount, NC Justice Center, Forward Justice, and the Duke Center for Community-Engaged Scholarship.