What do Greg Abbott, Croatia, the Roman Emperor Hadrian, ancient Hebrews, 6th century Greeks, Hammurabi, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders all have in common?

"Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors."

- Jesus Christ, The Lord's Prayer

What do Governor Greg Abbott and the GOP-controlled Texas Legislature have in common with Croatia, Rome's openly gay emperor Hadrian, an ancient Hebrew religious celebration, 6th century BC Athenian Greeks, Hammurabi, as well as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders?

They all implemented (or in the case of the Democratic presidential candidates, want to implement) large debt forgiveness programs that boosted their popularity and helped resolve problems deriving from intractable income inequality.

Starting in Texas, last year the Governor signed legislation to abolish Texas' Driver Responsibility surcharge, eliminating a whopping $2.5 billion in debt for around 1.4 million people, overriding past concerns that doing so would be unfair to those who'd already paid. Governor Abbott has also signed legislation to ban red-light cameras that eliminated penalties for nonpayment of old tickets, not to mention bills to eliminate $1.3 billion in outstanding toll road fines and fees and to pay student loans of peace officers.

But there are all sorts of historical examples of government-funded debt forgiveness programs dating back to the beginnings of government. Hammurabi canceled public debts four times in response to civil unrest, and when he "died in 1749 BC after a reign of 42 years, his successor, Samsuiluna, cancelled all debts to the State, and decreed that all tablets should be destroyed except those concerning traders’ debts."

Famously, in the Bible, "Jubilee" was the term for an ancient, once-every-50-year Jewish tradition celebrated during the first millennium BC in which public debts were forgiven and prisoners and slaves were freed.

In the 6th century BC in Athens, the lawmaker Solon implemented the "Seisachtheia" laws (try saying that three times fast!) which "cancelled all outstanding debts, retroactively emancipated all previously enslaved debtors, reinstated all confiscated serf property ... and forbade the use of personal freedom as collateral in all future debts."

Here are a couple more I heard recently on The History of Rome podcast that Grits began to plow through during my recent surgery recuperation: After defeating Marc Antony in 27 B.C., Octavian (aka, Augustus) burned all debt records from before the battle of Actium, thus wiping out debts prior to the civil war that ended with his ascension to power.

And upon assuming authority after Trajan's death, the Roman emperor Hadrian earned the goodwill of the people by forgiving all public debts, to the amazement and scorn of a disdainful Senate. Despite these spendthrift policies, which also extended to earning the allegiance of the legions through large pay increases, Gibbon recorded that Hadrian's reign constituted "the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous."

And of course, there are modern examples besides in Texas. In 2015, Croatia engineered debt forgiveness including debt to banks, telecom and utility operators for its 60,000 poorest citizens in an effort to give them a fresh start.

Now we can add Sanders and Warren's plans to forgive student-loan debts to the list. Although that was the newshook that made me dig up these historical analogies, Grits doesn't want to get too bogged down in the pros and cons of that proposal. I probably agree with it; maybe you don't; this isn't the place to debate why. Obviously, this blog has been far more concerned with eliminating criminal-justice debt, which is something I think about quite a lot.

These massive debt forgiveness campaigns were all, in a sense, unfair to those whose debts weren't forgiven. Certainly, in the examples from ancient Judea and Athens, slave owners surely were unhappy to watch their property walk free. But in the larger scheme of things, these programs were also a) economic boons and b) incredibly popular, generating excitement and loyalty among their beneficiaries and boosting the images of their proponents. Indeed, a cynic might contend these policies were undertaken by politicians simply aiming to ingratiate themselves with the public. (OTOH, if you're someone whose debt was forgiven, who cares?)

Leaving politics aside, though, one could also argue that all these examples were necessary correctives to oppressive government debt policies which were also unfair and ultimately, untenable.

Perhaps student-loan debts should only be the first step toward a long overdue 21st century Jubilee.

License center lines to get lenghier, the case for medical-led mental-health first response, and other stories

Here are a few odds and ends that merit Grits readers' attention:

License renewals from abolished driver surcharges may exacerbate lines at DPS license centers

Line outside DPS license center on North Lamar
in Austin ~7:30 a.m. Friday morning

It's going to be a rough fall at the DPS license centers. The Texas Legislature gave them $200 million to staff up at some of its biggest facilities, but those new workers won't come online for several months. In the meantime, about one million people with suspended licenses on Monday will have had all their Driver Responsibility surcharges wiped clean and can finally renew their driver's licenses, likely significantly adding to lines.

Sheriff shot up wrong vehicle
Somebody took a shot at a state trooper in Kimble County, and he called it in. The sheriff heard the call, set up on the side of the highway with an assault rifle, and shot up a passing pickup in response, wounding the driver. It was the wrong vehicle; the trooper had called in a "gray" truck and the pickup the sheriff shot up was white. Good piece from Eric Dexheimer with the details.

The case for medical-led mental-health first response
Here's an excellent case study out of Austin showing why cops shouldn't spearhead first response to most mental health calls. The Austin City Council is presently considering whether to shift to a medical-led response in most instances, following the lead of a Dallas PD pilot program.

'Cooking them to death'
The Marshall Project and the Weather Channel teamed up to report on the effects of excessive heat in Texas prisons.

Coming soon: New Travis County public defender office
Great news: The Texas Indigent Defense Commission approved grant funding for a new public-defender office in Travis County.

'Arrest, release, repeat'
The Prison Policy Institute came out with a new analysis discussing "How police and jails are misused to respond to social problems."

Feds failing at collecting police use-of-force data
Since 1994, the Bureau of Justice Statistics has been charged with gathering data on police use of force. But most agencies' data is garbage and most of the information is suspect or unusable, reported Kenny Jacoby of Gatehouse News.

Driver Responsibility surcharge abolition, by the numbers

The death of Texas' Driver Responsibility surcharge was the single, outstanding #cjreform highlight of the 86th Texas Legislature, outdistancing all other reforms in terms of impact by a country mile. Let's run through the numbers:

Nearly 1.4 million drivers currently have suspended licenses based on unpaid Driver Responsibility surcharges, or roughly half of all drivers who've ever received them. And on its website, the Department of Public Safety pledged to "reinstate all driver privileges that were previously suspended solely for having unpaid surcharges." But hold on just a second ...

While everyone will have their debt erased - the Texas Fair Defense Project estimated that the total amount of debt waived will approach $2.5 billion - a large number of people won't immediately get their licenses back.

Reported the Dallas Observer, 630,000 drivers will be immediately eligible to get their licenses back on Sept. 1st. Another 350,000 will be eligible to renew their license after paying a reinstatement fee, and 400,000 have other holds on their drivers licenses, mostly through the Omnibase program, through which the state suspends licenses for non-payment of fines and fees.

The reinstatement fees for the 350,000 people who owe them are $125 (Source), so that's just shy of $44 million dollars in fees those drivers must pay to get back on the road.

Bottom line, some portion of those folks will still have suspended licenses a year from now, plus the 400k people with licenses suspended under Omnibase also are still out of luck.

Thus, the new law stopped the generation of new surcharge debt, and waived past debts, but it only resolved license suspensions for a fraction of surcharge debtors - perhaps half of them or more.

Going forward, surcharges were abolished for points, no-insurance, and driving with an invalid license (DWLI), but retained and converted into criminal fines in DWI cases. Under the old program, DWIs only made up 12 percent of people who were assessed surcharges, so that eliminates them for 88 percent in the future. It remains to be seen how often judges waive those new DWI fines - they couldn't waive the surcharges at all.

There was an extent to which the Driver Responsiblity surcharge contributed to county-level incarceration by generating a huge pool of drivers with suspended licenses. When the surcharge program first rolled out, county jails were flooded and the Legislature in 2007 reduced first-offense DWLI penalties from a Class B to a Class C misdemeanor. But people are still arrested and jailed for second offense DWLI and higher.

In 2017, the Office of Court Administration documented 21,836 new Class B DWLI cases. We know that the overwhelming majority of people with suspended licenses lost them because of the Driver Responsibility surcharge - let's assume 75 percent, for the sake of the math. If those folks averaged just 2 days in jail each (the maximum penalty for a Class B misdemeanor is 6 months in jail and a $2,000 fine), then they collectively would have spent about 90 bed-years in jail!

So that's where we are, by the numbers. On September 1st, $2.5 billion in debts will be erased and hundreds of thousands of people will be eligible to get their licenses back.

For more background and/or details on license reinstatement, see FAQs from DPS and the Texas Fair Defense Project.

Scaling back justice debt biggest #cjreform accomplishment of 2019 #txlege

Texas justice reformers will spend the next couple of years lamenting what the Texas Lege DIDN'T do in 2019 - e.g., reduce marijuana penalties, pass the Sandra Bland law, close the dead-suspect loophole to the Public Information Act - or else frustrated by new criminal penalties boosting sentences for petty offenses.

But it's worth giving legislators credit for what they DID do on #cjreform, and by far the most important measures relate to providing relief from justice-system debt:

Abolishing the Driver Responsibility Surcharge: The Texas Fair Defense Project estimates that $2.5 billion in justice-debt will be wiped off the books on September 1st when HB 2048 takes effect, and some 1.5 million people will be eligible to have their drivers licenses reinstated.

Eliminating red-light cameras: While a few cities have lengthy contracts which will keep red light cameras operating for years to come, the Legislature forbade new ones and eliminated the ability to deny vehicle registration or license renewal for nonpayment. These cameras affect on safety is dubious, at best, and are viewed by locals as revenue generators.

Limited automatic driver's license suspensions: HB 162 would end the practice of searching driver records to suspend licenses of people driving without them. Now, such administrative suspensions based on a government database search will be limited to people whose licenses are suspended for DWI, and those would be limited to 90 days. The Washington Post last year reported that Texas has more people with suspended licenses than any other state. This new law and abolition of the Driver Responsibility surcharge should go a long way toward knocking that number down.

Defined "undue hardship" in debtors prison cases: In 2017, the Texas Lege approved legislation to make it easier for municipal judges and justices of the peace to waive Class C fines and authorize community service. But many local judges had been defining the term "undue hardship" narrowly to avoid waiving fines. Amendments to SB 346 define that term so that more fines will be waived. This was a cleanup bill, but quite necessary: Although more than 50,000 people had fines waived in the 2018, for example, more than ten times that number sat out their Class C fines in jail.

Two of these - surcharge abolition and eliminating red-light cameras - were pushed by reformers for 12 years before finally passing.

Overall, Grits is disappointed with the 86th Texas Lege, and particularly the Texas Senate, which produced scarce little reform legislation of consequence and killed most of what came over from the House. These bills amount to a consolation prize. But as my father likes to say, that's better than a sharp stick in the eye.

Abolition of driver surcharges a rare #cjreform upside for 2019 #txlege

In a Texas legislative session where scarce little justice-reform legislation of any stripe made it through the process, the abolition of the hated Driver-Responsibility surcharge will be remembered as the signature accomplishment. The bill getting rid of the program has finally passed and HB 2048 is headed to the governor.

From advocates' perspective, there wasn't a ton left to do. In 2017, a proposal to replace trauma-center funding generated by the surcharges with a nearly identical system of new "fines" died in the Senate. At the time, advocates promoted a number of much more reasonable funding solutions, and once it became clear that the most-regressive-possible surcharge repeal did not have a path, legislative leaders resigned themselves to looking at those suggestions.

With Senate Finance Chair Jane Nelson's blessing, Sen. Joan Huffman filed legislation in the senate, with Appropriations Chairman Dr. John Zerwas filing a companion bill in the House, which dropped the traffic-fine increase to $20, tacked a new $2 fee on insurance policies, and jiggled the ratios around regarding who got what to make the hospitals whole.

The bill abolished surcharges for everyone but DWI offenders. They receive 12 percent of all surcharges, so 88 percent of surcharges will be eliminated going forward.

For everyone owing surcharges at the time the bill becomes law on September 1, 2019, the debt will be nullified along with the program. That will allow 1.5 million people whose licenses currently are suspended over nonpayment of surcharges to get their licenses back.

Some of these folks have gone without licenses for more than a decade because they couldn't pay, with surcharges compounding because they drove with revoked licenses. Since 2003, about 3 million people have racked up 16 million surcharges, with half of them losing their licenses permanently, until this bill.

For DWI offenders, the old "surcharges" were kept on the books and renamed criminal fines, tacked on in addition to other punishments already on the books for the offense. But in contrast to "civil" surcharges, judges can waive criminal fines for indigent people. Plus, Emily Gerrick of the Texas Fair Defense Project convinced the senate to add a provision creating a presumptive indigence provision for these fines similar to that for surcharges. And with those perfecting amendments, the bill passed the senate.

This is a moment your correspondent has been working toward for more than a decade. Long-time readers will recall Grits worked with Alison Brock at Rep. Sylvester Turner's office, to create amnesty/indigence provisions for the surcharge, and with Mandy Marzullo, now my podcast co-host at Reasonably Suspicious, to implement the rules at DPS. Hating on the program has been a pet project of mine nearly since the inception of this blog.

The surcharges were created in 2003, and by 2007, people driving with licenses suspended under the program had become a chronic problem. That year, the Legislature changed DWLI on the first offense from a Class B to a Class C misdemeanor because unlicensed surcharge-owing drivers were filling up local jails. They also added DWLI to a list of offenses, the most prominent of which was pot possession, for which police could give citations instead of arresting people. That temporarily stemmed jail overcrowding pressures, though today, in some counties, Class B DWLIs still account for large percentages of the misdemeanor docket.

Indeed, during the worst of it, before indigence provisions kicked in, judges told the Legislature they were sentencing DWI cases as reckless driving or obstruction of a roadway to avoid defendants racking up surcharges that everyone knew they couldn't pay.

So these surcharges have driven misdemeanor-justice policies in Texas in unexpected, weird, and mostly negative, regressive ways for many years now. It's an incredible relief that they're about to go away.

The Texas Legislature may not accomplish much in 2019 on justice reform. But this will help so many people, the one victory nearly outweighs the (heart breaking) losses.

Time to move NOW on Driver Responsibility surcharge abolition

The Texas Legislature has its best-ever chance to abolish the Driver Responsibility surcharge before it in HB 2048 (Zerwas). All the major interests have signed off. Early in the session, leadership appeared prepared to (finally) move on the issue, and the bill was voted out of committee in early April.

But the legislation remains stuck in the House Calendars Committee and has yet to be considered, much less set for a vote, on the House floor. Although, officially, the last House calendar is May 7, bills must be placed on a calendar several days before - probably by the 1st or the 2nd - to be heard before the deadline for the House to consider House bills.

Every legislator knows about problems with the Driver Responsibility surcharge because they all get constituent calls from people whose lives have been ruined by this ill-conceived government boondoggle. Nobody likes the program who's not receiving money from it. But those special interests were so powerful, the money had to be found for the program to go away.

HB 2048 solves that problem through several sources. It increases fees on traffic offenses by $20 and adds a $2 fee to auto insurance policies.

That latter is apparently the hold up: Insurance industry lobbyists are fighting the $2 fee. But legislators should ignore them. The problem with the Driver Responsibility program is precisely that it relied upon a small number of mostly impoverished people - folks caught driving with suspended licenses or without insurance - to pay for trauma-hospital care. But that's the sort of classic public good whose cost should be spread among everyone. After all, anyone may eventually wind up in a trauma hospital.

A few other, disparate critics object to the new, stiff criminal fines for DWI, which replicate high DWI surcharges under the Driver Responsibility program, re-labeling them a criminal fines instead of civil penalties. And to be clear, Grits isn't a fan of that part of the bill. We know 44% of drivers can't pay fines at that level (because that's how many DWI offenders didn't pay the identical surcharges), so there's a real sense in which they're setting people up to fail.

The flip side is, under the status quo, DWI offenders still owe the same amount, just as civil surcharges instead of criminal fines. The difference is, judges can waive criminal fines but cannot waive surcharges. So there's more prospect for relief under HB 2048 than those drivers would have otherwise.

To recap: There are 1.5 million people with licenses suspended because of the Driver Responsibility surcharge. Those surcharges will be voided and those folks can get their licenses back.

Moreover, while the DWI folks still get large fines, they only made up 12 percent of people with surcharges. So 88 percent of people who would have previously gotten a surcharge will avoid them going forward.

Helping 1.5 million people at a whack, plus eliminating 88 percent of the problem going forward, makes this a Very Good Bill. The DWI fines are an unfortunate compromise, but even for those folks, they're better off if judges can waive those fines.

Since this terrible statute first passed back in 2003, there has never been a better opportunity to eliminate this program than right now. Grits hopes the House Calendars Committee will set this legislation on the Major State calendar at the earliest possibility and leadership strongly supports it. Every day they dawdle risks Texas wasting two more years before this longstanding problem is addressed.

UPDATE: Hurray!! This bill was added to a House floor calendar for Monday, April 29, meaning it still has plenty of time to pass. Thank you, Calendars Committee!

Podcast: Elsa Alcala says Texas death penalty unreliable; parsing new TX traffic-stop data; prospects for Lone-Star marijuana reform, and other stories

Here's the March 2018 episode  of the Reasonably Suspicious podcast, recorded last week on the SXSW Podcast Stage hosted by Cadence13. Former Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Judge Elsa Alcala was our special guest, focusing on junk forensic science and the death penalty.


Here's what's on this month's show:

Opening Riff
Would permanently shifting to Daylight Savings Time reduce crime?

Top Stories

• Prospects for marijuana reform in Texas
• New data on use of force at Texas traffic stops
• Legislative proposals to end the Driver Responsibility surcharge

Forensic Focus
Judge Elsa Alcala discusses junk science cases at the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.

Death and Texas
Judge Alcala discusses the evolution of her views on capital punishment, from proponent to critic, and what the Texas Legislature should do to fix the state's unconstitutional laws on executing people with developmental disabilities.

The Last Hurrah

• More corruption revealed after botched drug raid in Houston
• Should stealing Amazon packages become a felony?
• Closing the "Dead Suspect" loophole to the Texas Public Information Act

Find a transcript of the show below the jump.

Bill limiting suspensions a start at untangling worst-in-nation driver-license mess

Texas revokes more drivers licenses, by far, than any other state, The Washington Post reported last year. But House Corrections Committee Chairman James White wants to change that. He has a bill up in the Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee on Wednesday that would rectify a small but unremittingly ill-conceived provision in the current law.

Presently, Texas law doubles down on license suspension as a punishment, even when it fails to keep drivers off the road. When the Transportation Code lists grounds for suspending licenses, the very first one is driving while one's "license was suspended, canceled, disqualified, or revoked, or without a license after an application for a license was denied."

So one of the punishments for driving with your license suspended is to suspend your license for a minimum of one extra year. Combined with the Driver Responsibility surcharge, which has left more than a million Texans with suspended licenses, this provision adds insult to injury, leaving drivers without a license even after delinquent surcharges are finally paid.

By contrast, people who engage in "habitually reckless" driving, "fraudulent use" of their license, or are responsible for an accident that results in serious personal injury or property damage, only get a 90-day suspension.

Driving with an invalid license is already its own crime, so it doesn't particularly need the extra administrative penaltyy. Chairman White's HB 162 would apply the extra suspension only for drivers whose licenses were suspended for DWI. And then, he would limit the suspension to 90 days, which is the amount of time for all other suspensions under the same provision.

It's a small change but it would help untangle a particularly difficult bureaucratic gnarl which can ensnare drivers for years after they've otherwise paid their debt to society. Grits is glad to see the bill getting an early hearing and hope it garners support in committee.

Legislation filed to abolish driver surcharges

Yesterday, Texas Senate State Affairs Committee Chairwoman Joan Huffman and House Appropriations Committee Chairman John Zerwas filed companion bills which appear to be the leadership-driven abolition proposal for the Driver Responsibility Program (DRP) that will be the main focus this session.

SB 918 and HB 2048 aren't perfect, but they're certainly headed in the right direction. The bills suggest an array of new funding sources for trauma hospitals, most of which are less objectionable than the reviled Driver Responsibility surcharge.

The bill increases a fee on auto insurance policies by two bucks, 60% of which would go to the trauma fund. It diverts money from a vehicle-registration fee that was already authorized to fund the DRP. And it raises the state portion of traffic fines on certain moving violations from $30 to $50, while lowering the municipal portion from 5% to 4%; however, only 30% of that money will go to trauma centers, with the rest headed to the general revenue fund.

Perhaps the most controversial funding source would simply rename surcharges for people convicted of DWI, calling them "fines" but applying them in exactly the same way.

So, "in addition to the fine prescribed for the offense," which is set by the judge, the bill proposes that first-time Class B DWI offenders pay a "fine" of $3,000 spread out over three years; $4,500 for second offenders; $6,000 for third. Thirty percent of this money will go to trauma hospitals; the rest goes to the state's general-revenue fund.

Here's the rub: When those same fines were "surcharges," a majority of drivers could not pay them. And in an era when the Federal Reserve tells us 40% of the American public cannot pay a surprise $400 bill without going into debt or selling something, there's little reason to expect that will change.

Unless judges are given the ability to waive or reduce those amounts at sentencing, this is going to create the same problems we saw under the Driver Responsibility Program with respect to high nonpayment rates for DWI offenders. Indeed, low payment rates inevitably will make these fines another unreliable funding source for trauma hospitals, just as surcharges never remotely paid hospitals as much as the Lege originally predicted.

In Texas, DWI is presently a Class B misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a $2,000 fine on the first offense. This bill would add a mandatory $3,000 fine on top of that, which we already know from experience most people can't pay.

To Grits, the more rational approach would be to increase the max fine for misdemeanor DWI to $3,000 ($4,500 on the second offense, etc.), letting judges set the number, taking into account ability to pay. Then fund trauma hospitals from a general-revenue line item to ensure stability. (They're generating quite a bit of new, general-revenue money in this bill.) That way, legislators could signal their disapprobation for DWI by increasing fines, but avoid replicating predictable failures we've already seen from unpaid surcharges.

Even Mothers Against Drunk Driving supported allowing judges to waive or reduce surcharges in the interests of justice. The Legislature should do the same with DWI fines.

Regardless, all these problems with high fines are happening now in the status quo for DWI offenders, and the bill would eliminate surcharges for hundreds of thousands of people going forward. By any measure, it's an improvement.

CORRECTION: The original version of this blog post indicated that people with existing surcharges would not receive amnesty under the bill. That was inaccurate. Grits regrets the error.

Fixing longstanding criminal-justice problems in a black-ink budget year

Comptroller Glenn Hegar gave the Texas Legislature some good news with a black-ink budget projection for the coming biennium, suggesting they may have more than $9 billion more to spend than in 2017. Some of that will go for Hurricane Harvey costs (thought the Rainy Day fund should also contribute to that), some will get gobbled up with increased costs for entitlement programs, and any school finance fix will almost certainly consume the lion's share of the rest.

But it's not inconceivable that the Texas Legislature could use some of that money to solve ongoing problems in the justice system. What might that look like? Here are some ideas Grits brainstormed; let me know in the comments if you think of others:

Eliminate the Driver Responsibility Surcharge: $300 million

Both Texas political parties and every politician under the Pink Dome you ask wishes the Driver Responsibility Surcharge weren't the law. But the program brings in roughly $300 million per year - half goes to the General Revenue fund, half goes to hospital trauma centers - and politically, the surcharge can't be repealed unless the state comes up with the money.

Raise the Age: $45 million

When the 85th Texas Legislature ended, Texas was one of seven states that prosecuted 17 year olds as adults. Today we're one of only four. There's a decent chance that, if the Lege doesn't change the law this year, we'll be the only one when the 87th Legislature convenes in 2021. The Legislative Budget Board estimated making the shift would cost $45 million during the first biennium of implementation, and $70 million per biennium after that, to send youth through juvenile corrections systems instead of the adult side. (There's some evidence these costs are overstated, under-estimating related savings.) The House has passed RTA legislation two sessions in a row, but senators and the Lt. Governor are unlikely to bite without a dedicated allocation in the budget.

Boost reentry funds: $30 million

Increasing funds to prisoners leaving TDCJ from $100 to $300 would cost ~$13 million per year, $26 million per biennium. Tack on another $4 million per biennium to make sure they have driver's licenses or ID cards when they hit the streets, and mandate that DPS issue them based on information provide by TDCJ. Neither of these were in the agency's appropriations request, but they should have been.

Crime labs: $8-10 million

The Legislature either needs to boost funding for crime labs by perhaps $8-10 million per biennium or start charging for services. The DPS LAR only asked for $5.8 million that was taken away from the agency in user fees. But that amount was insufficient to solve the months-long backlogs presently being experienced. Legislators should find out what would be needed to reduce backlogs to a reasonable period then fund DPS crime labs at THAT level. Or, alternatively, Grits supported the user fees the Governor rescinded in the interim and think they're a reasonable way to fund this service.

Prison costs soaring: Cuts needed

TDCJ's appropriations request asked for an increase of more than $700 million beyond what's already a $7.3 billion-with-a-b budget. The LAR suggests the agency needs $247 million over the next biennium to maintain current (low, perhaps even unconstitutional) standards for provision of inmate health care, and another $32 million for probationer treatment funds. They also asked for $156 million for staff raises and $146 million in facility repairs. These are not unreasonable requests, but Legislature should enact further decarceration reforms and close understaffed, rural prison units and those requiring costly repairs to pay for those requests and reduce upward cost pressures.

Indigent defense: Est. $10 million

Counties want the state to pay 100% of indigent defense costs. For reasons Grits has articulated previously, that's a specious and self-interested position that flies in the face of the traditional state-county roles in the justice system. That said, the state would benefit from additional, targeted investments in the indigent-defense system. They should prioritize Texas Indigent Defense Commission grants for public-defender officers, which are the most effective and efficient way to deliver legal services where they're needed most. They should finance a capital defender office to handle indigent death penalty cases. ($1 million per biennium.) They should boost funding for the Office of Capital and Forensic Writs. And they should take Judge Elsa Alcala's advice to fund counsel for indigent defendants filing habeas corpus writs related to ineffective assistance of counsel. Obviously, public-defender grants could be of any size, but $10 million added over the biennium to these priorities would make a big difference.

I didn't include an estimate for upgrades to mental-health services because a) I have no idea how to evaluate costs or need, and b) my sense is the state would be better off if these services were primarily utilized outside the justice system, breaking from past practices. But that's certainly another area in need of investment. And there are probably specific investments to reduce competency restoration waits and to better meet the mental-health needs of incarcerated people that deserved to make this list. The Lege could boost state investments well into the nine-figure range and it still wouldn't be enough.

Podcast: Adversaries over Austin police-union contract sit down; when is it okay for courts to electrocute mentally ill defendants?; pythons as stocking stuffers?; and other stories

When is it okay for a judge to electrocute a mentally ill defendant?

What leverage did a Texas civil rights activist say enabled Austin advocates to force reforms into the city's police-union contract?

How many pet pythons are too many, and are they appropriate to give at Christmas as stocking stuffers?

These and other questions are answered on this month's episode of the Reasonably Suspicious podcast. As always, you can subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or SoundCloud, or listen to it here:


Here's what's in this month's episode:

Opening: Pythons as stocking stuffers?

Top Story

• Principles for progressive prosecutors

Interview
Police-union negotiators Ron DeLord and Chris Perkins sit down with a now-familiar adversary, Chas Moore of the Austin Justice Coalition, to discuss the aftermath of the year-long fight over the capital city's police-union contract.

Home Court Advantage

• When is it okay to electrocute a mentally ill defendant in court? Discussion of James Calvert oral arguments
• Ken-Paxton prosecutors de-funded, but at what cost to indigent defense?

The Last Hurrah

• Dallas PD officer indicted for murder
• Lawsuit challenges driver surcharges
• Ray Hill, R.I.P.

Find a transcript of the show below the jump.

A flaw in Travis County's plan to ↓ DWLI

Chris Harris of Grassroots Leadership reported yesterday on Twitter that Travis County will institute a new program to reduce arrests for driving with an invalid license. Here's what he says that will mean for drivers with revoked licenses:

• If cited (not arrested) by police, you will be charged with a Class C instead of B 
• If you plead guilty and get your license and insurance renewed w/in 6 months the charge is dismissed

Earlier this summer, the Austin Statesman reported that, "The number of Class B misdemeanors filed last year in Travis County — 3,425 — was three times higher than the combined total in Bexar, Dallas and Tarrant counties and exceeded the number of filings in the more populous Harris County, according to data produced by the Office of Court Administration."

That article blamed Austin PD for filing the higher charge, but prosecutors have complete discretion over what charges to bring in these cases: Those were decisions by the County Attorney's office. Now that they've made a different one, clearly they expect APD to just comply.

Which brings us to the key problem: even now it's unclear to your correspondent that County Attorney David Escamilla has proposed a workable plan. Most people with suspended licenses in Texas had them revoked for nonpayment of driver-responsibility surcharges. So, how may we expect them to get their license renewed within six months?

Can't pay means can't pay; one can't squeeze blood from a stone.

This will be better. Charging people with Class Cs instead of Class Bs limits the bad outcomes. But it will still result in punishing people for being too poor to pay their Driver Responsibility surcharges, and in the end, punishment won't fix that problem.

Long DPS lines making costs of TX driver surcharges more apparent, outweigh revenue to trauma centers

For years, the economics of Texas' Driver Responsibility surcharge - and its role in subsidizing trauma hospitals around the state - have been cited as the principle barrier to its abolition.

But those economics may be changing before our eyes as the state prepares to pony up hundreds of millions of dollars to reduce long lines at Texas Department of Public Safety driver-license centers.

College Station Municipal Judge Ed Spillane was quoted extensively in a TV news story explaining the failings of the Driver Responsibility Program, which regular readers are aware attaches civil penalties on top of criminal fines for certain traffic-related offenses, most frequently driving with an invalid license (DWLI) and failure to maintain insurance coverage. The economic consequences for low-income drivers was well-described by Spillane and a local driver caught up in the surcharge-cycle for the last decade. Check it out.

When it comes to solutions, Spillane rightly declared that legislators "are at a loss" about how to get rid of the program because half of the money raised (after paying the collections contractor) goes to trauma hospitals, with the other half going into the general revenue fund.

However, the costs and unintended consequences of the Driver Responsibility Program are beginning to add up, and as a result, Grits believes the economics of surcharge abolition may be shifting as other costs rise.

Which brings us to Texas DPS, which has lately come under fire for long lines at driver-license centers. There are essentially two major causes of long lines for renewing driver licenses: Understaffing the Customer Service Center call lines, and the policy decision to revoke a half-million driver-licenses per year to punish nonpayment of fines and fees, most of it for unpaid DRP surcharges.

Underfunding the call center means drivers who can't get DPS on the phone will go into the driver-license centers when many of them could have renewed online. And revoking a half-million licenses per year for nonpayment adds an ever-increasing volume of drivers to the lines who frequently a) cannot renew online and b) have more complex cases to resolve.

So far, legislators have only discussed the first problem: Funding the call center. But eventually, they must address underlying causes of long lines or the problem will recur. The Washington Post reported earlier this year that, among states, "Texas, by far, suspends the most driver’s licenses for failure to pay fines," estimating 1.7 million people with revoked licenses, 1.4 million of whom had their licenses revoked over unpaid surcharges.

So what does it cost to address needlessly long lines at license centers? DPS announced it will request an additional $420 million over the next biennium to deal with long lines: $178.6 million for increased staffing at current offices, $190.1 million to open new offices in high-demand areas, and $51.3 million to boost staffing at the call center.

By contrast, the DRP generates less than $150 million per biennium for hospital trauma centers, and a like amount for the general revenue fund, so nearly $300 million total. But an unintended consequence of the DRP is contributing to long lines at the license centers, which is costing much more than that!

This is like robbing Peter to pay Paul, then still having to pay Paul!

There are other unintended consequences, including major economic detriments from having 1.7 million people with revoked licenses. New Jersey has one of the only comparable surcharge programs in the country, and about a decade ago they performed an extensive survey to analyze the economic outcomes from revoking licenses for unpaid surcharges. In a 2010 blog post, Grits summarized the results thusly:

According to that survey, of persons with suspended licenses whose annual income was under $30,000: (1) 64% were unable to maintain their prior employment following a license suspension; (2) only 51% of persons who lost their job following a license suspension were able to find new employment; (3) 66% reported that their license suspension negatively affected their job performance; and (4) 90% of persons whose license was suspended within this income bracket indicated that they were unable to pay costs that were related to their suspended driving privileges. In addition, of those who were able to find a new job following a license suspension-related dismissal, 88% reported a reduction in income.

We may expect similar results, one imagines, among low-income Texas drivers caught in the same predicament.

Viewed broadly, the economic implications are staggering. In addition to money spent so that hundreds of thousands of extra drivers with revoked licenses can wait in line at the license centers to renew them, the state is losing tax money from reduced income and spending among people who owe surcharges. Plus, Texas' economy suffers from reduced demand as an ever growing cohort of adults experiences the above-cited dings to their earning potential.

Tack onto this the costs passed on to counties and municipal governments for enforcement, particularly regarding DWLI, which has become a perennial problem. In Ector County, for example, driving with an invalid license constitutes the second-most common misdemeanor case prosecuted by the County Attorney after marijuana possession. Local municipal judges and Justices of the Peace face the brunt of these increased caseloads from the DRP and must deal face to face with the seemingly endless sea of drivers under its yoke.

Indeed, one could continue nearly ad infinitum with a list of negative, unintended consequences stemming from DRP license-revocations. A 2015 public policy report, which helped convince the California Legislature last year to end license revocations for nonpayment, articulated some of the additional, hidden costs from, "Using license suspensions to collect debt rather than to preserve public safety."

[T]here are millions of Californians who are not a driving safety threat, but who cannot have valid driver’s licenses. According to the American Association of Motor Vehicle Administrators, this type of license suspension is dangerous because it diverts police officer time and attention from public safety priorities. The police, DMV, and courts spend millions arresting, processing, administering, and adjudicating charges for driving on a suspended license. Add in the cost of jailing drivers whose primary fault was failing to pay, and we have a costly debtor’s prison. 

The current policies are counterproductive for employers as well: there is a cost to hiring and re-training a new person for a job being done well by someone else. It is an unnecessary expense to both employers and the state to pay unemployment insurance for an employee who would be retained if the person had a license. 

Additional costs to the state include the fact that many more families have to rely on safety net public benefits because these millions of suspended licenses are a barrier to gainful employment. There are also the secondary impacts of unemployment on the economy and on families living in poverty; children often bear the brunt of the harms of poverty, and some of these costs will not be fully realized for decades.

All of those critiques apply, in spades, to driver-license revocations in Texas. And most of the half-million annual license revocations in Texas stem from unpaid Driver Responsibility surcharges. Of the 3 million drivers who owe surcharges, nearly half (1.4 million) have had their licenses revoked for nonpayment.

This colossal failure of a program increasingly has become not just a cost-driver for DPS license centers but even a drag on the economy, and by extension, state and local government revenue.

Your correspondent remains hopeful that the 86th Legislature marks the moment when Texas stops looking at driver surcharges as a cash cow and begins to think of them as a money pit. Evidence for that view is becoming increasingly hard to ignore.

See prior, related Grits posts:

• Texas DPS acknowledges short-staffed call center in budget request to reduce license-center lines
• Texas DPS getting a bum rap over proposed driver-license center closures
• How the Driver Responsibility Surcharge contributes to long lines at DPS license centers

Podcast: Colloff on blood spatter, causes of long lines at DPS license centers, understaffing at rural prisons, and other stories

If you can get past a few bad puns in the intro, I think we've got a good show for you this time on the better-late-than-never August 2018 edition of the Reasonably Suspicious podcast, Just Liberty's monthly discussion of Texas criminal-justice politics and policy.


The segment I've been most looking forward to, of course, was the interview with Pamela Colloff, long-form journalist extraordinaire, who left Texas Monthly last year to write for ProPublica. We discussed her latest New York Times Magazine cover story about an apparent false conviction based on more-than-dubious blood-spatter evidence. (I'll publish my full interview with Colloff over the weekend.) But I was happy with the rest of the show, too. Here's what my co-host Mandy Marzullo, executive director of the Texas Defender Service, are discussing this month:

Top Stories

• Long lines at Texas DPS driver-license centers.
• Texas prison system can't keep rural prisons staffed.

Death and Texas

• Texas' junk-science writ revisiting dubious forensics in capital cases.

Interview:

• Scott Henson interviews Pam Colloff of ProPublica/New York Times Magazine on her latest feature on blood-spatter evidence and more.

The Last Hurrah

• Governor Abbott opposes red-light cameras.
• Healthcare funding beneath 'minimum standards,' say Texas prison docs.
• 5th Circuit scales back Harris bail-reform order.

One minor error I noticed when I was editing this together: I'd said during the Death and Texas segment that DPS licenses forensic hypnotists, when in fact it's the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement.

Find a transcript of the podcast below the jump.

Harris Sheriff's captain providing cover for Balch Springs shooter, the TX bail-reform roller coaster, and other stories

Here are a few odds and ends for Grits readers to chew on headed into the weekend:

Harris Sheriff's captain providing cover for Balch Springs shooter
A Harris County Sheriff's captain testified as an expert witness for the defense in the trial of Roy Oliver, the Balch Springs police officer who shot a fleeing, unarmed 9th grader to death in a nationally publicized episode that got Oliver fired and indicted. One wonders, does this mean we may expect the Harris County Sheriff's office to take a less strict view on when its officers may shoot at fleeing, unarmed suspects? The Dallas News reported that the Harris County Sheriff's captain, Jay Oliver Coons, "reviews use-of-force cases at the sheriff's department." Does Sheriff Ed Gonzalez agree that the shooting of Jordan Edwards was justified and it would be okay if his deputies did the same thing, or has his captain's testimony gone off the reservation? Inquiring minds want to know ...

Bail-reform roller coaster
August saw bail reform efforts take a gut-wrenching roller coaster ride. First, Gov. Greg Abbott joined legislative and judicial reformers in supporting bail reform, suggesting the bill be named after a murdered state trooper.  But then the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals unexpectedly gutted the order governing Harris County bail policies, reneging on critiques of detention policies that discriminated based on defendants' wealth. Instead, they insisted that such discrimination is okay as long as defendants receive individualized hearings. That relieves some pressure on the Texas Legislature to pass bail reform, but does so just at the moment state leaders appeared to be reaching consensus on what bipartisan reforms might look like. Who knows where the issue goes from here?

Felony record not a bar to council candidacy
The Austin city clerk this week agreed that Lewis Conway, Jr., is eligible to run for office because, despite a quarter-century-old manslaughter conviction for stabbing to death a man who allegedly stole his drug stash. Conway is  now "off paper," having completed his parole requirements and regained his right to vote. The Texas Tribune reported that, "Conway's success Tuesday is unique for one big reason: He's a convicted felon." But "unique" is not the right word because in 2014, Bexar County elected a former drug dealer with a felony conviction as its District Attorney, so the precedent was already set. As with Conway, local officials and opposing candidates declined to challenge Nico Lahood's candidacy in a much higher-stakes race. Grits congratulates Conway on affirming that precedent, and I'm plesased he'll be on the ballot.

Management inattention to crime lab at Austin PD backfiring
Austin PD crime lab's DNA section may remain shuttered for many more years, judging by a report that the city may continue using an outside DNA lab through 2022. Although public debates and the local media have downplayed the culpability of APD managers, the unfortunate truth is that under the previous chief, Art Acevedo, the department largely ignored its civilian functions like crime-scene techs, victim services, and the crime lab. Instead, they focused every extra dollar on expanding the number of and pay going to officers on patrol. Just weeks after Acevedo left to take the reins at Houston PD, the crime lab debacle blew up under his successor's watch. Current Chief Brian Manley was one of Acevedo's commanders and has similarly prioritized budgets for sworn staff over improving the agency's civilian functions. Despite that, the city council could locate no other candidates to even consider; apparently Manley was the only qualified guy they could find. (There's no "Rooney Rule" for police chiefs; after Dallas hired a black woman as chief, for example, there clearly were no other minority candidates anywhere who might be worthy of consideration, hence Austin considered none [/sarcasm].) So I'm not surprised that officials expect the situation to linger on. APD hasn't prioritized its civilian functions in many years and it's hard to view Manley's hiring as anything more or less than an affirmation of the status quo.

DPS suggests closing license centers as long lines loom
As headlines continue about long lines at DPS driver license centers, the agency has suggested closing 87 smaller offices - many of which have only one employee and/or low customer volumes - in order to consolidate resources at the centers with long lines. That could be the right management move, but politically, Grits predicts it will be a non-starter. A few may be closed, but I'd be surprised if the number of closures reached double digits, much less 87. And anyway, closing small facilities won't solve the bigger problems exacerbating long lines at the DPS megacenters, which have more to do with legislative policy than agency-level logistics.

Junk science challenges proliferating
Many so-called "forensic sciences" are really non-scientific, subjective comparisons made by cops, not scientists, argued an editorial at The Legal Intelligencer. That was the reason Texas created a new form of habeas corpus writ - discussed recently in the Texas Tribune in the context of shaken-baby cases - to allow redress when the legal system bases convictions on junk science. The writ is also currently being used to challenge the validity of bite mark evidence as well as blood spatters, a topic Grits delved into in an interview with ProPublica reporter Pam Colloff (read her latest) for the podcast that will be out next week.  RELATED: Top ten junk forensic sciences challenged in Texas.

Cohen doesn't cotton to FIRST-STEP opposition
Check out Right on Crime Director Derek Cohen's rebuttal to U.S. Senator Tom Cotton regarding the latter man's opposition to the FIRST-STEP Act and sentencing reform. Wrote Cohen, "We started Right on Crime in 2010 to advance policies that protect both the taxpayer and their pocketbook, and the outcomes of no government program is above scrutiny. Prisons are a vital contributor to our public safety, but are only one of many tools is our toolbox." In recent days, we've seen President Trump first embrace the bill and then reportedly back off until after the election. From this remove, Grits can't tell who in D.C. is serious about reform or what chances it has in the current political environment. Whatever is the case now could change with the next presidential tweet. But I do know that reformers' opposition to the bill was ill-considered and based on partisan considerations, not #cjreform principles. Passing moderate bipartisan reform is clearly better than doing nothing, which is the alternative.

How the Driver Responsibility surcharge contributes to long lines at DPS license centers

One of our legislator friends reached out this week to ask about a comment Grits made in this roundup related to long lines at Texas driver-license megacenters around the state. Your correspondent believes that unnecessary driver-license revocations and understaffing of civilian DPS customer-service functions are the main causes of long lines at DPS license centers.

This legislator wanted to know, could Grits quantify how much extra pressure people with revoked licenses put on the system? Not precisely. But let's attempt a ballpark, back-of-the-napkin estimate, and also elaborate on the call-center problem.

Phone-center flaws force unnecessary visits to DL centers

First, how many people are headed to the DPS for license renewals anyway? And how many are required to be there? There are roughly 16 million licensed drivers in Texas. Those drivers must renew their licenses every seven years, so each year ~2-2/7 million annually must renew their licenses. Half of those can do so online, so the baseline minimum number of people coming in for this service is around 1-1/7 million, or ~1.14 million people.

The Dallas News reported that, "According to the Department of Public Safety, more than 3.6 million people who visited DPS offices in 2017 didn't need to do so." But framing the issue that way amounts to DPS blaming drivers for its own failed systems. In fact, a large number of these unnecessary visits occur because people cannot get help on the phone. According to the most recent DPS Strategic Plan, currently the DPS customer service center (CSC):

receives approximately 24,400 calls per day, but because of limited staff and technology it is only able to answer approximately 4,880 of those calls, 20% of the demand. The CSC is currently only able to answer about 17% of these 4,880 calls within 10 minutes, far below an acceptable customer service level. Customers are forced to call the CSC multiple times to enter the queue to speak with a Customer Service Representative (CSR). Once in the queue, customers must wait an average of 15 minutes before their call is answered. 

Unfortunately, DPS has so far focused on beefing up staffing at the driver-license centers instead of the Customer Service Center.

Increasing call-center staffing - Grits would suggest by six-to-eight-fold, if you truly want to keep up with demand - would significantly reduce lines at the driver-license center. But even that wouldn't solve the whole problem.

The contribution of license revocations to long lines

DPS issues more than 5 million licenses per year, according to its latest biennial report (p.12). Renewals make up ~2.3 million, another 650,000 or so are first-time licensees, and about a half-million commercial drivers licenses are issued annually. So those categories account for ~3.45 of slightly more than 5 million licenses issued.

The next biggest category of licenses issued - although DPS doesn't quantify it in their public documentation - are people with revoked licenses trying to get them back. How many people are we talking about?

DPS suspends roughly half a million licenses per year, they told the Sunset Commission last year (p. 419-420): "In FY 2016, there were 432,847 driver improvement suspensions and 77,611 safety responsibility suspensions."

Over time, these suspensions add up. As of November 2016, DPS told the Sunset Commission, a total of 3,082,627 drivers had been assessed 16,505,923 DRP surcharges since the program's inception. Of those 3 million, "Approximately 1.4 million drivers are currently suspended for non-payment."

On top of that, another ~300,000 have lost their licenses solely for non-payment of traffic fines. All told, about 1.7 million Texans - more than 10 percent of licensed drivers - have had their licenses suspended for nonpayment of either traffic tickets or the Driver Responsibility surcharge, the Washington Post reported earlier this year, noting that, "Texas, by far, suspends the most driver’s licenses for failure to pay fines."

So, there are ~3.45 million licenses issued for renewals, first timers, and CDLs, but 1.7 million people who also need to have their licence reinstated because of a suspension. They don't all try every year, but hundreds of thousands certainly do, with the number growing annually. And since these can be complicated situations, they may require multiple visits. When my daughter had her license suspended for an unpaid surcharge a few years back, she had to go to DPS several times before it was all resolved.

Moreover, it's possible for some of those 1.7 million to have licenses issued and suspended multiple times within the same year. Say, for example, a person has had their license suspended for failure to pay a Driver Responsibility surcharge. They approach DPS to get on a payment plan, their license is reinstated, but six months later they quit making payments and their license is revoked again. Then, say that three months after that, the person resumes payments and seeks to have their license reinstated. That would account for two licenses issued - to someone who otherwise likely wouldn't need it renewed at all that year - in just a few months time.

I can't quantify it precisely, but that's a big chunk of the problem.

Other trends and caveats

Grits would also caveat DPS' claim that population growth is driving licensing waits. Yes, Texas' population is growing, but a lower proportion of young people are getting driver licenses. According to a 2016 study, "For 16- through 44-year-olds, there was a continuous decrease in the percentage of persons with a driver’s license for the years examined. For example, the percentages for 20- to 24-year-olds in 1983, 2008, 2011, and 2014 were 91.8%, 82.0%, 79.7%, and 76.7%, respectively." Similarly, the number of people aged 45-69 with a driver license has been decreasing for the last decade, said the same study. People over 70 were the only category where the proportion of people with licenses increased until 2011, when it began to slightly decline.

This trend substantially mitigates population growth. If young people were getting licenses at the same proportion as in 1983, when your correspondent got his learner's permit, imagine how much more overwhelmed the license centers would be!!

DPS faces a big job managing Texas' driver licenses. But the job is made more complicated and the volume is increased substantially by the use of driver licenses for debt collection (and, more broadly, virtue signalling) as opposed to simply ensuring drivers are qualified and providing reliable identification. California last year addressed the same issue by ceasing use of driver-license suspensions to punish non-payment. 

Texas leaders have responded to long lines at driver-license centers by throwing more money at the problem to build mega-centers and beef up license-center staffing. More staff is certainly needed in the short term (although if Grits ran the show, I'd focus more on staffing the Customer Service Centers). But even additional staff investments won't fix underlying structural issues regarding revoked licenses. That's a function of the failed Driver Responsibility surcharge and using driver-license revocations for punishment. Like the DPS staffing budget, those polices can only be addressed by the Texas Legislature.

TXDoT waived $1.3 billion in defaulted toll late fees; shouldn't old DRP surcharges also be waived?

The Texas Department of Transportation has announced it will waive $1.3 billion dollars in late fees on toll fines,  The agency had sent 2.2 million accounts to collections agencies last year, alone, reported KXAN.

The change comes after the Legislature capped late fees at $48 per year, so the agency waived old ones going back to 2007.

Grits' first thought: The anti-toll people got a bigger win last session than I knew!

My second: That's in the ballpark of the size of the unpaid surcharges in the Driver Responsibility program. If the Lege can suck up and eliminate that much bad debt on the toll side, they should be able to do the same thing for the surcharge program, which deals out a comparable amount of economic misery, plus the added legal problems arising from a revoked driver's license.

A lot of legislators are now aware of problems with the surcharge program, so Grits still harbors hopes that all Texas needs to get rid of it is a session with a little black ink in the budget to cover the on-paper losses. Unfortunately, that won't be the 86th session in 2019.

But news that the Lege eliminated this old debt last year in another red-ink budget makes me a tad more sanguine. It shows they can do it when they want to.

DRP surcharges impinging on post-Harvey rebound for thousands of Texans

Image H/T: TCJC

In the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, the Texas Department of Public Safety delayed Driver Responsibility surcharge payments for 60 days and announced it would waive $11 driver replacement fees for people in the 50 counties affected. But those short-term accommodations now have come and gone, and the DRP surcharge is still a huge barrier to getting a drivers license for tens of thousands of Texans trying to get back on their feet after one of the state's biggest-ever natural disasters. For more than 1.3 million Texans, it has become a nearly insurmountable barrier to getting a drivers license, which these days is nearly a prerequisite to participation in public life. Now's not the time to press for payments when those affected by the floods are still getting back on their feet. Go here to ask Texas state leaders to waive Driver Responsibility Program surcharges for people living in Harvey-affected areas.

Ultimately, the Legislature should abolish the DRP entirely. But until they take that step, the Department of Public Safety has authority to grant amnesty. And this sort of large-scale emergency clearly justifies taking every possible step to get people in the region street-legal and back to work.

This post was updated to clarify that the Harvey-related delay in DRP payments for debtors in affected counties is now over.

Support from leadership needed to get rid of Driver Responsibility Surcharge

The Republican House Speaker from Michigan is pushing to get rid of that state's version of the Orwellian-named Driver Responsibility Surcharge. Here's a quote from one of the bill's supporters which could easily have come from critics of the program in Texas:

As a prosecutor in Genesee County, I saw every day the awful impact these unfair fees had on Michigan families. ... Far too many working people who received a ticket and paid their fine were hit with new, impossible surcharges, often costing them their licenses, and then their jobs, and then their ability to ever pay off the mountain of debt. These are good people who just want to get to work and drive to school to pick up their children. They want to do the right thing, but the government has them trapped in a cycle of failure from which they can never escape. That is not right, and it is well past time we repealed this unjust mistake.

I've always believed that if any of Texas' Big 3 legislative leadership took this on - the Speaker, the Lt. Governor, or the Governor - abolition could happen pretty quickly. Without such leadership, though, abolition keeps getting hung up in "the pay for," as the missus refers to it, and repeal bills keep dying session after session.

Grits doesn't know what it would take to get one or more of those three interested in repealing these surcharges. The idea has gained little momentum at the Lege despite quite a bit of bipartisan support for jettisoning the program. That's mainly because the hospitals don't want to give up a lucrative revenue stream, even if the program suffers from profound and well-known dysfunction.

Perhaps Michigan's example will spur interest among Texas' rulers where the pleas of their constituents did not.

Two questions and a comment as CA ends driver-license suspensions for nonpayment of traffic tickets

In California, a reader alerts me, the Legislature ended driver license suspensions as punishment for unpaid traffic fines because a government analysis convinced the governor and lawmakers that, “There does not appear to be a strong connection” between the license suspensions and collection rates.

That's certainly appeared to be the case in Texas with driver licenses suspended for unpaid Driver Responsibility surcharges and/or unpaid traffic fines. At this point, suspensions represent around 10 percent of drivers, mitigated only slightly in recent years by a one-time DRP amnesty and a stingy-but-at-least-existent indigence program (which this blog helped secure along with our allies at the Texas Fair Defense Project back in the day).

To this news, Grits has two questions and a comment:

Question One: Grits would love to know precisely what analysis was performed to convince revenue-hungry legislators that suspensions weren't successful at coercing payment from drivers. I think it's true, based on the huge number of drivers in Texas whose suspensions have lasted for many years, sometimes more than a decade. But my supposition is an inference from the data, not a proof. If someone concocted a proof, I want to know what it was so we replicate it for Texas.

Question Two: Among the arguments that convinced legislators to support this bill, one of the most persuasive was that "losing the ability to drive to work can prevent people from earning money and actually make low-income drivers less likely to pay fines." Was this quantified? Can it be quantified? If that dynamic could be demonstrated from the data, and particularly Texas-specific data, I think it would be persuasive for legislators who are currently on the fence regarding license suspensions and the Driver Responsibility program.

The closest I've seen was a 2006 study out of New Jersey, which has the only other DRP similar to Texas'. As Grits pointed out in this 2010 post, 

According to that survey, of persons with suspended licenses whose annual income was under $30,000: (1) 64% were unable to maintain their prior employment following a license suspension; (2) only 51% of persons who lost their job following a license suspension were able to find a new employment; (3) 66% reported that their license suspension negatively affected their job performance; and (4) 90% of persons whose license was suspended within this income bracket indicated that they were unable to pay costs that were related to their suspended driving privileges. In addition, of those who were able to find a new job following a license suspension-related dismissal, 88% reported a reduction in income.

Regrettably, I've never seen that study replicated elsewhere and certainly nobody in Texas has tried to perform anything like it.

We've got a year-and-a-half until the Texas Legislature meets again, so now's the time for this research to be performed before the DRP-abolition effort ramps up again in 2019. Maybe it exists and Grits just hasn't seen it, in which case, shame on me. But if these are things done specifically from California's data, I'd like to know how they were done and if they were replicable.

And now the comment:

In California, according to the above-linked AP article, as of March, "488,000 people had suspended driver's licenses for unpaid traffic tickets or missing court appearances." And Golden-State legislators considered this a big problem they needed to confront.

In Texas, more than 2 million people have had their licenses suspended for nonpayment of Driver Responsibility Program surcharges, with 2/3 of them unable to get them back. Some of these debtors have now gone without licenses for more than a decade, most of them continuing to drive. Even more people's licenses have been suspended for nonpayment of traditional traffic fines. (Hard to estimate because there is crossover between these groups: Emily Gerrick of the Texas Fair Defense Project estimated that, if DRP surcharge debts were eliminated, roughly half of those folks would still have suspended licenses because of unpaid traffic tickets, while others had their licenses suspended for tickets but never incurred surcharges.)

Texas has about 60 percent of California's population, but by comparison our driver-license suspensions are through the roof. Their lawmakers felt the need to nip the problem in the bud long before it got remotely as bad as the situation is here. By contrast, Texas state leaders have allowed this mess to fester for more than a decade! However you want to look at it, Texas' massive volume of suspended licenses speaks far more to the failures of government than its former licensees.

We're approaching a point where such a large critical mass of Texas drivers do not have official credentials because of criminal-justice debt that not having a driver's license becomes a norm for average working people. I hear Americans critique Mexico for tolerating large black markets and unofficial transactions, but that's exactly what happens when Americans can't get the official ID one needs to participate in public life in the 21st century. (E.g., every transaction shifts to cash because credit card companies won't issue credit and no one will take a check without ID.) Grits can't understand why this isn't being treated like the self-inflicted public-safety crisis that it truly is.

The Golden State's experiment will show us whether revenue drops because this extra, administrative punishment is removed. My bet is it won't. Hell, revenue in Texas from traffic tickets barely dropped when the number of tickets issued plunged! ("The number of [new] Class C arrest warrants dropped 42 percent from 2011 to 2013, for example, rising slightly thereafter. Revenue from municipal courts, however, only dropped 3.1 percent from 2011 to 2013.") I'm betting those collections stay pretty consistent. Most people whose licenses are suspended would keep it from happening if they possibly could, they just can't afford to pay their debts to the government.

Grits won't hold my breath, but this issue would look great as a last-minute addition to the special session call. In California, the problem got fixed because the Governor showed leadership. In Texas, a lack of gubernatorial leadership is precisely one of the reasons we haven't come close to solving the same problem.

RELATED: Time for 'Jubilee' on criminal-justice debt.