The number of suspended licenses for failure to appear in Illinois results in an earning loss of $1.3 billion.
Contact with the criminal legal system and sanctions such as driver’s license suspensions can result in limited employment opportunities and have lifelong impacts on a person’s potential earnings. In Illinois, drivers must appear in court to resolve suspensions and potentially pay a reinstatement fee. The Illinois Secretary of State estimates that over 100K Illinoisans have their driver’s licenses suspended due to their failure to appear in traffic court. The authors use the national estimated annual income loss due to having one’s driver’s license suspended to apply those figures to Illinois to illustrate how this translates to actual losses across the state.
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Key Findings:
- As of November 2022, 102,511 Illinois drivers had their licenses suspended due to failure to appear in traffic court.
- Of the ten zip codes with the highest number of failure to appear suspensions, 9 are majority Black, 1 is majority Latinx, and all 10 have above-average poverty levels.
- The national estimated loss associated with a suspended driver’s license is $12,700 annually per suspension.