Driver's License Suspension: A View from the Bench
By James Gramling

Posted on 4/26/07

It’s a good thing I’ve come to terms with myself. You see, I am a major suspender of driving privileges in the City of Milwaukee. I have been for 21 years. I have ordered hundreds of thousands of suspensions. It is just short of a miracle that I have been given this opportunity to comment on the effort to protect driver’s licenses. But, as I say, I have come to terms with myself.

My conversion began in the early 1990’s when I began to see an increase in our court of defendants charged with Operating While Suspended (OWS). The numbers back me up. In 1987, our three-judge court heard 5,465 OWS cases, and suspended 32,308 licenses. Ten years later, in 1997, the numbers grew to 20,018 cases and 62,466 suspended licenses. Something was changing. It was not a good change for the often poor, often minority drivers appearing before me on these charges.

The reasons for all these suspensions are many. However, many are not related to unsafe driving. Here’s how things work in courts throughout the state. Judges are expected to hold violators accountable. In most traffic cases, that is done by ordering a fine. When the fines are not paid, the judge can order either jail time or a license suspension. Jails are crowded, it takes police time to arrest and book people, and it costs a lot of money to house inmates. Suspending a defendant’s driver’s license is … free …and takes just a key stroke or form in the mail. You can see why there are a lot of suspensions.

Poor people get a lot of tickets

Quite naturally, unpaid fines are often linked to poor or marginally-employed drivers. Community service – the method often used by poor people to pay fines – is constitutionally mandated only where an indigent person is headed to jail. Judges traditionally shy away from allowing it to be used to remedy a driver’s license suspension. So, lots of poor people, whose access to jobs is dependent on having a driver’s license, have been historically cut off from the means to clear up fines.

It often starts with a parking ticket that goes unpaid. Over 1,000,000 parking tickets have been issued in Milwaukee each year over the past several years, many of them in low income neighborhoods for overnight violations. These tickets don’t fit within the budget restraints of many low-income families. That unpaid parking ticket causes a registration suspension which prevents the vehicle owner from getting a renewal sticker for the plate. That leads to an unregistered vehicle ticket, oftentimes coupled with a suspended registration ticket, which also go unpaid. That leads to a driver’s license suspension and a continuing cycle of OWS tickets and more unpaid fines. The longer drivers stay at it, the closer they get to criminal charges and jail time.

It can happen to anyone

These are not bad people and usually not bad drivers. A speeding violation or two on someone’s record shouldn’t provoke us to cast the first stone. I can recall a certain candidate for governor, reelected several times, who came into office with a reportedly large number of defective speedometer convictions on his driving record. He was rewarded with a state driver. The people I’m talking about might have been barred from a job by the convictions and certainly would have struggled to pay the fines.

Judges are key to this discussion. Fewer suspensions, and use of community service to address suspensions, would go a long way to address the problem. Fortunately, I have seen evidence that judges throughout the Metropolitan Milwaukee area are beginning to get comfortable with allowing community service to pay traffic fines. And the Legislature has developed methods of collecting unpaid fines that do not rely on license suspensions. For example, courts can now intercept a defendant’s state tax refund to pay a fine by submitting the defendant’s driver’s license number to the Department of Revenue. Millions of dollars in fines can now be collected without a single suspension.

Part of the impetus for these promising developments is the creation of the Center for Driver’s License Recovery and Employability. The Center is the product of many months work by representatives from Legal Action of Wisconsin, Justice 2000, Milwaukee Area Technical College, Making Connections Milwaukee, Milwaukee Municipal Court, and others. Housed in space donated by MATC and funded by the City and the Helen Bader, Jane Bradley Pettit, and Annie E. Casey Foundations, the Center is spearheading the effort to change public policy and get people licensed. Area W-2 agencies have recently indicated an interest in purchasing access for their clients, and discussions are under way with the State Department of Corrections to have the Center assist released inmates to get licensed.

I’m happy to say I’m using a lot of community service now, and haven’t ordered a new suspended license since this past October by relying on tax intercept. And that’s gone a long way toward bringing me to terms with myself.

James Gramling recently retired from 21 years as a Milwaukee County Municipal Court Judge.