Jessica George has two options, and either could land her in jail.

She is required to appear every month for court-ordered urine tests in Aurora, about 90 miles from her family’s home in Simla. The tests are a condition of probation for a misdemeanor offense from a few years ago.

But George isn’t allowed to drive.

Her driver’s license is suspended. It’s not because she has been found to be a dangerous driver — it’s because she owes about $3,100 in various unpaid court fines and fees. Her license is one of tens of thousands that Colorado suspended in 2019 because of court debt — a system that many argue effectively taxes and criminalizes poverty.

Lawmakers in 2020 may move to abolish debt-related license suspensions in Colorado, but for now, George, like many others, is likely to stay on suspension because she simply doesn’t have the money to pay.

And that puts her in a no-win situation. In Simla, a town of 600, she doesn’t know anyone who can regularly drive her to and from Aurora. There are no buses here. Ride-hailing apps are hopeless.

She must choose between illegally driving herself, or staying home and missing the urine tests — a violation of probation that a judge has advised her could mean jail time.

So she drives.

If she sees a cop car behind her, her mind nervously drifts to how much it will cost to bond out of jail, how much it will cost to get her family’s old Nissan out of impound. She prays, “Please, God, don’t let them get me.” She makes a right-hand turn as soon as possible and creeps back onto the road once she thinks the cop has passed.

“There’s this feeling of ‘Well, I’m a criminal,’ ” she says. “And I am. This is what I do. I have to drive. I’m stuck between a rock and a hard place. Actually, I’m stuck between jail and jail.”

Bills and bad data

Of the various tools that governments in Colorado and beyond use to coerce people into paying off court fines and fees, none is more common than license suspension, which is legal in all but six states.

In the last year alone, Colorado’s Division of Motor Vehicles reports, the state enforced about 457,000 driver’s licenses suspensions.

Many in that bunch were dinged for impaired driving, driving without insurance or for unpaid child support, among other offenses.

But the plurality — about 86,500, according to state analysts — were given to people who failed to pay off court debts.

It is for this group that Colorado lawmakers are eyeing potentially life-changing legislation during the 2020 session, which begins Jan. 8. State Rep. Leslie Herod of Denver said she and Sen. Pete Lee, a fellow Democrat of Colorado Springs, are considering a bill to end driver’s license suspensions for unpaid fines and fees.

“Revoking a person’s license for failure to pay a court debt is bad policy. And we need to remove it,” Herod said. “I absolutely believe it’s unjust to create a system like this — one that preys on those who cannot afford to pay, who are down on their luck, and where we continue to push them down.”

Like-minded Colorado Democrats have tried similar bills the past two sessions.

In the 2018 session, state Rep. Mike Weissman, an Aurora Democrat, championed a bill to end all driver’s license suspensions for unpaid court debt. The bill dropped a couple weeks before the session ended and fizzled.

Democratic state Rep. Matt Gray, a former prosecutor in Broomfield, successfully ran a bill in 2017 to reduce the punishment for people caught driving with suspended licenses. Prior to the bill, driving under a suspended license in Colorado, in any circumstance, was a misdemeanor criminal offense punishable by up to 6 months in jail. It’s now considered a civil infraction, and the ACLU estimates some 5,000 Coloradans avoided potential jail time last year as a result of Gray’s bill. Still, those driving under suspension with a certain number of points on their license, including George, can still be sent to jail.



As it turns out, state officials, lawmakers and advocates interested in this topic were for years working with what may have been seriously inaccurate data.

From 2014 to 2017, the annual number of driver’s license suspensions in Colorado averaged about 213,000, according to annual reports released by the Department of Revenue. In 2018 — after the Division of Motor Vehicles implemented a new computer system meant to offer more accurate data tracking — the figure shot up past 459,000, and it was just shy of that mark in fiscal year 2019, which ended June 30. However, Julie Brooks, spokeswoman for the state DMV, said Friday that recent annual totals may have been even more wrong than previously realized.

“I’m not a criminal. I’m a mom.”

A suspended license, as Jessica George has learned, can snowball. Lose your ability to drive, and you might lose your job, and have trouble accessing food, health care, clothing — if you can even afford those things. You might lose your housing, too. And so on.

For the George family, the devastation is multigenerational.

Lisa George, 55, is a widow and a mother of six, including Jessica. She shares her modest Simla home with a mentally disabled adult daughter, Crystal; Jessica; and Jessica’s baby. The living situation is getting to be a squeeze. Money — they all live off a government subsidy of $775 per month — has been a squeeze for a while.

Lisa George’s living room used to fill up with neighbors and friends. That was before her driver’s license got suspended, before she had to start asking those neighbors and friends for rides, and before she started worrying that the neighbors and friends resented her for asking all the time.

“Her and her husband used to work and raise kids and ride motorcycles and did a lot of stuff. Now she don’t do nothing,” says Gerald Lawien, 63, who lives a few miles down the road. “She can’t go nowhere and, when she does, it’s such a guilt trip that it ain’t no fun.”

Lawien drives Lisa George sometimes. He’s living in poverty, too, and trades car rides for whatever she can offer him — a pair of used boots, some shepherd’s pie.

Lisa George would like to work. She has experience as a building inspector, and says she’s good at it. But she also has struggled with substance abuse, leading to entanglements with the criminal justice system. Even though she has been sober for 19 months, some $4,600 in unpaid court debt still stands between her and a driver’s license.

“If I had the license, if they erased the court fines, my life would change totally,” she said. “I’ve worked my whole life. I’m not a criminal. I’m a mom. I raised kids. And now I’m looking over my shoulder all the time.”

She has worked out a payment plan with the court, in which she pays off $20 of her debt per month. At that rate, Lisa George will be out of court debt around the time she turns 75. And so she has little hope left for any semblance of the lifestyle she so desperately wants to reclaim.

“You shouldn’t be losing your license because of money,” she says. “A license is how you can make money.”

“A kick in the pants”

Matt Gray, the Broomfield representative, says that when he was a DA, he must have met with a thousand people who had been caught driving under a suspended license.

“I can tell you that none of them were wearing business suits,” he says.

Poverty can also be a reason people get tickets in the first place. A broken headlight or expired license plate tags, for instance, are problems some drivers can’t afford to fix.

The suspension program that affects so many Coloradans every year, Gray says, is a “system built to give a kick in the pants to people who have the means to pay.

“And for that system, it works. It’s not bad. But it’s the same system that applies to people who can’t afford to pay, and they’re the ones who wind up in the cycle that goes on and on. If you can’t afford to pay the first fine, then the second fine, the ($95) reinstatement fee — now we’re just piling on. And that doesn’t make sense.”

Increasingly, policymakers on both sides of the aisle agree with Gray’s assessment. His 2017 bill was co-championed by a Republican senator, Bob Gardner of Colorado Springs. Advocates are in talks with at least one potential GOP sponsor for a 2020 bill.

The national “Free to Drive” coalition, which works to end debt-related driver’s license suspensions nationwide, counts among its members not just progressive and criminal justice reform-minded groups like the ACLU of Colorado, but also Koch Industries, multiple chapters of Americans for Prosperity and the conservative organization Right on Crime. The powerful, right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council adopted a resolution in support of the notion that driver’s license suspensions should only occur for conduct related to dangerous driving.

Right on Crime’s Marc Levin authored the policy that ALEC adopted.

“Those of us right of center are very much skeptical of government taxes, and this is really just another form of raising revenue,” he says. “I don’t think the purpose of the justice system should be to raise revenue.”

But even with some national momentum, the fact that Democrats control the Colorado House, Senate and governor’s office, and demonstrated interest from reform-minded Republicans, it’s difficult to pass a bill in Colorado to eliminate suspensions over unpaid debt. Gray said his 2017 experience taught him about two main reasons for this.

One is that, as Levin notes, governments fuel their budgets partially through court fines and fees. A nonpartisan fiscal analysis of the scuttled 2018 bill estimated that Colorado would lose about $3.5 million in revenue in the first year if it were to stop debt-related license suspensions.

Additionally, Gray says, the threat of a suspended license is leverage for municipal courts to get people to actually pay for speeding or other infractions.

Corey Hoffman, a lawyer who acts as city attorney for smaller Colorado jurisdictions including Northglenn, Black Hawk and Cañon City, said that license suspensions for unpaid debt are “frankly the only tool that municipal courts have.”

Hoffman says he is sympathetic to those who say they can’t afford to pay their debts, but adds that, in his observation, municipal courts are usually willing to “work with” people on this.

If a person is concerned about a debt they can’t afford to pay at once, he advises, they should go to court and say that.

“This doesn’t have anything to do with ability to pay, and it has everything to do with personal responsibility,” he said. “And in my experience, when courts have folks with an inability to pay, they work with them in a whole host of ways to make sure they’re not unduly burdening them.”

Payment plans don’t always work for people, as the Georges’ stories illustrate. Jessica George is on the same long-term payment plan as her mom.

Before divorcing, she and her ex-husband made good money repairing dented and hail-damaged cars. She’s only 34, and she wants to work again — her dream is to go back to school and then work as a paralegal — but there are no jobs for her in Simla besides occasional yard work and house cleaning, which means she might have to commute to nearby Elizabeth, 45 minutes away, or maybe somewhere farther down the road.

She drives to mandatory urine tests in Aurora now, but a job, even a part-time one, would mean driving way more often, thereby increasing her chances of going to jail. Jail means time away from her baby, an 11-month-old boy named Chase, and she cannot bear that risk.

“There’s plenty of jobs in Colorado. They are hiring everywhere,” she says. “Which is awesome, but a lot of people like me are still unemployed because of the driving situation.”