America's cruel way to punish poor debtors: take away their driver's license
Damian Stinnie is one of the millions of people in America who have had their driver’s licenses suspended because of unpaid debt. Despite spending much of his childhood in foster care, Stinnie graduated from high school with a 3.9 grade point average. While seeking work after losing his first low-paying job, he received four traffic violations and racked up $1,000 in fines and costs.
Because he was unable to pay the full amount within 30 days, his license was automatically suspended. As is routine in many states, including Virginia, where Stinnie lived, no one asked him if he could afford to pay. So, like three-quarters of those suspended, Stinnie lost his license essentially because he was poor, not because of the infractions themselves.
At that point, Stinnie joined the millions of Americans who face the dilemma of getting to work, taking a sick child to the hospital, or buying groceries while risking penalties for driving with a suspended license.
Needless to say, many people take the risk because they have no choice; at least 75% of those who have their licenses suspended keep driving. So the debtor may be arrested again for driving without a license, this time to be incarcerated and certainly to be hit with another set of fines and fees.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/nov/10/america-punish-poor-debtors-drivers-license-suspension
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Response to turbinetree (Original post)
Response to sfwriter (Reply #2)
It's kind of a modern day version of debtor's prison. Lock 'em up until they pay. 
Vera Cheeks, a resident of Bainbridge, Georgia, was ticketed for rolling through a stop sign in 2014. The judge hit her with a $135 fine and ordered her to pay it in full immediately. Cheeks said that she was unemployed and caring for her terminally ill father, so the judge gave her three months to pay up, during which time she’d be on “probation.” He sent her to a room behind the courtroom, where a long line of people—all of them African-American—were waiting to pay money to a woman behind a desk. “It was like the twilight zone, totally mind-boggling,” Cheeks recalls.
The woman behind the desk told Cheeks that she had to sign a paper indicating that she had been placed on probation and now owed $267—the fine plus $105 for the (for-profit) probation company that would be monitoring her, as well as $27 for the Georgia Crime Victims Emergency Fund. When Cheeks refused to agree to the so-called probation and the additional sums, the woman—who, it turned out, worked for the probation company—told her that the judge would put her in jail for five days. Cheeks still refused, and finally the woman demanded a $50 payment on the spot if Cheeks wanted to avoid being jailed. Cheeks’s fiancé raised the money by pawning her engagement ring and Weed Eater lawn machine. That avoided the crisis for the moment, but Cheeks was told she would still be jailed if she was late on even one payment.
https://www.thenation.com/article/the-price-of-justice/
When I was growing up, "nothing" was privatized in the justice system
