Improving Economic Mobility for Women

I recently spent a day at the Women’s Justice Conference, a convening to develop ideas and strategies to improve the economic mobility of women impacted by the justice system, hosted by the Council on Criminal Justice’s Women’s Justice Commission and Jobs for the Future. All the speakers in the morning and afternoon plenary sessions were women with lived experience with the justice system. The plenary sessions set the stage for breakout discussions throughout the day, identifying barriers to economic mobility for justice-impacted women and solutions based on the expertise of women who had directly confronted and navigated those barriers. In fact, many of the women are now advocates helping other women navigate those barriers every day.  

One thing became clear almost immediately: fines and fees are a barrier for every woman who has any contact with the justice system. 

In the first breakout discussion about the barriers to economic mobility, three formerly incarcerated women shared their experiences with fines and fees and their impacts on economic mobility. One woman described having roughly $600 taken from her paycheck each month to pay off her fines and fees, leaving her without enough money to support herself. She no longer believed she could work in the mainstream economy and meet even her basic needs. The courts and probation and parole officers say they want people to work, yet simultaneously seize so much of a justice-impacted person’s pay that working becomes untenable. 

Another woman talked about how her fines and fees debt was reported to the credit bureaus, destroying her credit and making stable housing difficult to impossible to find. A third told us about how she owed almost $7,000, mostly in the form of accrued public defender fees. She explained that she was fortunate enough to have a family support structure around her that could absorb this debt, because that bill would have overshadowed and negatively impacted every part of her reentry if she needed to contend with that debt herself. 

These aren’t isolated hardships. Fees – costs for involuntary participation in the criminal legal system – are charged at nearly every step of progression through the court system across the country, and they hit hardest against people who already have the least. They aren’t designed for serving justice. They were designed as a tool that’s supposed to raise revenue, but in fact, act as a tool to indefinitely perpetuate the punishment of anyone without the means to pay. They must be eliminated. 

Eliminating any single fee is harm reduction. It keeps needed financial resources in the pockets of communities who need them the most. It’s work that genuinely matters. But the women I met need something far more sweeping than only chipping away at the edges. The states making real progress are the ones eliminating whole categories of fees at once. 

The barrier I heard named most often, though, was the one that follows women furthest: a suspended driver’s license.  Because of the gender wealth gap, particularly after incarceration, women are less likely to be able to afford to pay their fines and fees, and thus more vulnerable to the draconian consequences of non-payment, including driver’s license suspensions. 

When you suspend the license of a woman who is also the person holding a household together, you do not suspend one person’s mobility; you suspend a family’s. When a justice-impacted woman’s license is suspended, her earning potential plummets. And she can’t legally drive to get groceries, take her children to school or extracurricular activities, or even to the doctor.

The fix cannot be partial. Comprehensive reform means ending suspensions tied to failure to pay and failure to appear alike, and restoring licenses automatically and retroactively, rather than one hardship petition at a time. That is where the evidence points. It is also, unmistakably, where the women in that room were pointing.

I left that day more convinced, not less, that this work is winnable. The progress is real, and it is happening now in places willing to do something sweeping rather than symbolic. Our job is to follow the research, keep listening to the people who have navigated these barriers, and then make the policy match exactly what they tell us.