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Millions of people in the United States are subjected to Legal Financial Obligations (LFOs), otherwise known as the fees and fines imposed by the criminal justice system. This debt can be a source of stress for individuals because of their limited ability to pay it off. But how does this debt affect their physical well-being? Currently, little is known about how LFOs acting as stressors affect physical health and if relief is found when the debt has been paid. To explore this, I used the Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking to examine four questions: 1) are those with lower income more likely to have an LFO? 2) Do individuals with LFOs report poorer physical health than those without LFOs? 3) Does a change in LFO status affect an individual’s physical health? and 4) Does this effect change based on an individual’s income? In my analysis, I found that those with lower income have a higher probability of having an LFO. I also found that having an LFO is associated with reporting worse physical health, while individuals who never had an LFO or paid off an LFO report better physical health. When income was used as a moderator, there were no significant differences between groups. These findings help us understand the negative impact of LFOs on an individual’s health. We can see how LFOs act as a regressive tax where those with less income pay more and not having an LFO or paying off an LFO is better for your health than having one.

In this dissertation, I examine the history of the driver’s license in California – drawing on legal and transportation history literature to better understand how licensing policies promoted automobility but also left behind certain drivers. Over the course of the twentieth century, adults increasingly needed to drive. The more essential a driver’s license was for daily life, the more effective the threat of its suspension. In a series of consequential court decisions in the late 1920s and early 1930s, California courts increasingly held that driving was not a fundamental right but a privilege. Progressively, driver’s license suspensions became a generic government enforcement technique; California and most other states continue to use suspensions to enforce a wide range of statutes, and violations that trigger them can be found in various government code sections. Policymakers use license suspensions as leverage for social control and as a tool to generate revenue, such as enforcing child support payments and coercing drivers to pay outstanding fines and fees. From the beginning the driver’s license was a regulatory tool that allowed most drivers to travel relatively undisturbed. Minority drivers, however, were most likely to be stopped by law enforcement and punished in the courts and, therefore, to feel the sting of a suspension and the additional criminal and monetary penalties of getting caught driving without a license. In metropolitan areas built around the automobile, and underserved by public transit modes, the consequences of being without a driver’s license are far-reaching. To redress the inequities and harmful consequences associated with driver’s license policy, it is important to first diagnose the cause and scope of the problem. In this dissertation, I provide a history of the driver’s license in California to understand both the ubiquity and eclecticism in the ways the license has been used, and how race/ethnicity and income are implicated. This study extends the existing scholarship on non-driving-related suspensions beyond failure-to-pay suspensions. My research shows the emergence of two license regimes in California: one for the Everyman and a hidden, punitive regime that occupies a dark corner of the law. The findings inform ongoing policy efforts to reform harmful non-driving related suspension policies.