By Rachel Crumpler
Brentley, a woman incarcerated at Western Correctional Center for Women in Black Mountain, is nearing her release from prison in June 2027. She’s nervous about starting over from scratch.
One question had been weighing on her: How would she rebuild her life with a suspended driver’s license?
Finding housing and employment, attending health care appointments, buying groceries and meeting with probation and parole officers — nearly every essential task after release will require transportation. In western North Carolina, where Brentley — whom NC Health News is identifying by her first name — plans to stay after her release, public transportation options are limited. It’s the same in many counties across the state.
So when she saw a flyer on a bulletin board at the prison advertising the driver’s license restoration clinic, Brentley signed up.
This week, she was one of 30 women who participated in a driver’s license restoration clinic led by Duke University School of Law Pro Bono Program and Pisgah Legal Services, a nonprofit providing free legal assistance to low-income people in western North Carolina. Law students and pro bono attorneys met one-on-one with the women to review their driver’s license records and explain the steps needed for reinstatement.
“I know my license is suspended,” Brentley said at the beginning of her meeting. “I don’t know what I need to do to get it back.”
A shocking number of North Carolinians are in the same position — most often because of unpaid traffic fines and fees or missed court dates. Nearly 900,000 people in North Carolina had suspended licenses for one of those reasons as of January 2025, according to a report on driver’s license suspensions from the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law. That represents about one in 10 of the state’s almost 8 million licensed adult drivers.
‘You need a license’
“Let’s be real: You need a license,” Brentley said. “You need a vehicle to be productive and to get around, to get a job. If you don’t, for a certain amount of time, usually, eventually you’re going to drive. I don’t want to do that anymore.”
By the end of her meeting with Will VanRenterghem, a first-year law student at Duke, and Pisgah Legal Services staff attorney Ed Treat, Brentley knew her path forward — and her relief was visible.
They explained that she had one suspension on her license tied to a 2019 DWI charge. After her release, they said, Brentley will need to meet with a substance use assessor — for a fee — who could require treatment before her license can be reinstated.
Treat told her that a lot of classes are now offered online, which could help her fulfill the requirement.
“I want to get out and just set a good foundation,” she said. Having a license is an important part of that.
Others served by the clinic had multiple suspensions along with an accumulation of fees — some totaling in the thousands of dollars. Each woman left with an advice letter outlining next steps to take to get their license and an annotated copy of their DMV records explaining the causes of suspensions in plain language.
Recognizing how often license suspensions complicate reentry to the community after release, the N.C. Department of Adult Correction has recently started holding driver’s license restoration clinics at prisons in partnership with North Carolina law schools and pro bono attorneys.
“You cannot do anything without a license or an ID card, and so it is literally the foundational piece to everything else that you have to do when you release from prison,” N.C. Department of Adult Correction Secretary Leslie Cooley Dismukes told NC Health News. “We’ve got to make sure that we’ve got that in place so that people can succeed in the other areas.”
A barrier to reentry
For many people leaving prison, a suspended driver’s license quickly becomes a major obstacle to rebuilding their lives.
That was Greg Singleton’s predicament when he was released from prison in 1996.
At first, he found a job at a dry cleaner in Raleigh that was within walking distance of the transitional house where he was living. After his background check came back, he said, he was fired. The next position he lined up was miles away.
“I drove a couple of months without a driver’s license out of survival,” Singleton said. “I was trying to get my life in order, trying to get some income coming in.
“I prayed every tire roll that I would not get stopped by the police.”
Now Singleton works with formerly incarcerated people frequently facing similar dilemmas. As dean of academic programs at Opportunities Industrialization Center of Rocky Mount, he helps connect people with education and job training.
Singleton said he’s repeatedly seen how transportation access is crucial to reentry success. It’s how people connect to resources and support, such as taking courses at community colleges and seeking mental health and substance use treatment.
The miles between locations can feel and practically be insurmountable, he said. Alternatives to driving — such as public transportation — often don’t reach where people need to go and services can be unpredictable. Uber and other ride-share services get expensive, especially for people just getting back on their feet. Relying on rides from family and friends only goes so far.
He noted that trucking jobs, which require a Commercial Driver’s License, are one of the growing employment opportunities for people with criminal records. But that path isn’t available if someone doesn’t even have a regular driver’s license.
Those connections were clear to the handful of women who participated in the driver’s license restoration clinic on March 10 and who are part of a program where they are working to earn their commercial licenses while incarcerated.
‘Counterproductive’ policy
A driver’s license can be suspended for many reasons in North Carolina, but according to Duke’s Wilson Center, the two biggest causes of suspensions are for failure to pay fines and fees, and for failure to appear in court.
Top reasons a driver’s license can be suspended:
- Failure to appear: If a person misses their court date, the court sends notice to the DMV 20 days after the missed court date and adds a $200 fee for the non-appearance. The person has 60 days to resolve the matter or the DMV suspends their driver’s license.
- Failure to comply: If a person does not pay their traffic fine or fee within 40 days of the due date, the court notifies the DMV. The person has 60 days to pay the amount owed or the DMV suspends their driver’s license.
Failures to appear can be dismissed if the prosecutor agrees. Failure-to-pay suspensions remain in place until the person pays outstanding court fines and fees or successfully petitions the court to waive them.
Laura Webb, project director of the Fair Chance Criminal Justice Project at the North Carolina Justice Center, said these types of license suspensions can trap people in a vicious cycle. She’s helped hundreds of people restore their licenses.
“They can’t pay their tickets,” Webb said. “They might get a seat belt ticket that is out of reach for them financially. They’re not able to pay it, their license gets suspended, and then because their license is suspended, they might lose their job, and then they’re definitely not able to pay it.
“Suspending someone’s driver’s license and completely limiting their ability to get around does not help someone come to court,” Webb said. “They’re probably going to use limited resources to get to court or drive illegally, which we don’t want to see happen, and so it’s counterproductive.
“It’s also counterproductive to suspend someone’s driver’s license who you want to see pay their debt, because often not having a driver’s license leads to you losing the job, the job that you need to get income to pay your debt,” she said.
Whitley Carpenter, senior criminal justice counsel and policy manager at Forward Justice, said she’s seen the same thing.
“Most people are not trying to buck the system,” Carpenter said. “What it creates is two tiers for the court system. Someone that comes in and has the resources can leave and go on about their life. They can pay the court fees and never be bothered again. Someone that has to choose between feeding their children or paying their court debt, then leaves, has a revoked license, has to figure out how to maneuver around life without a license, and then ultimately gets kind of caught in a system of driving on a revoked license because there’s not really any other alternatives. Then they incur more fees.”
Data shows that resolving driver’s license suspensions often takes years. The statewide average time to resolve a failure to appear was 1,605 days — almost four and a half years. For failure to comply with fees, the average time to resolution was 927 days, according to Duke Wilson Center analysis, though times varied widely between counties.
In recent years, more than half of states nationwide have passed legislation to eliminate or curb debt-based suspensions. North Carolina has not.
Advocates have been pushing for change for years, highlighting the widespread impact of driver’s license suspensions on economic and health outcomes.
“We are in the growing minority of states that still suspend driver’s licenses for these issues that are not related to public safety,” Webb said.
House Bill 980, sponsored by Rep. Allen Chesser (R-Middlesex), includes reforms that would stop automatic notice to the DMV to suspend someone’s license when the failure to pay or failure to appear happens. The bill proposes appropriating $250,000 for a court text reminder system.
“That doesn’t mean that the failure to pay would go away or the failure to appear would go away,” said Carpenter, who supports the legislation. “It’s just not directly tied to someone’s ability to legally drive in the state. We have to figure out another way to ensure compliance without taking away something that makes it harder to comply.”
The bill hasn’t moved since it was filed in April 2025.
People without a license remain in a bind — they drive anyway, which can fuel further criminal involvement. Driving while a license is revoked is a criminal offense resulting in an added fine and up to 20 days in jail. Despite this, every year, there are about 200,000 such cases in North Carolina, according to a 2025 report from Duke’s Wilson Center.
Singleton, a reentry advocate, said a policy change would make economic sense.
“If we restore licenses to those that want it, we have an opportunity to improve the North Carolina workforce,” Singleton said. “If we improve the North Carolina workforce, we improve economic development.”
Expanding driver’s license restoration clinics
State leaders say addressing license suspensions is one way to reduce barriers to reentry.
Among the many goals of the Department of Adult Correction is to make sure that all of the more than 18,000 people released from North Carolina prisons every year leave with identification in hand — whether a driver’s license or state ID card.
Holding these driver’s license restoration clinics inside prisons is a new strategy. So far, seven clinics have been held.
Campbell University’s Blanchard Community Law Clinic partnered with the Department of Adult Correction to run the first clinic in fall 2024. Now the school works with the department to hold a clinic each semester, giving students an opportunity to work with real clients.
“The more people that we can help if there’s a way to restore their driver’s license, I think it really does benefit them and benefits their community and makes everyone safer,” said Kris Parks, a staff attorney at the Campbell clinic.
Duke Law got involved in helping lead driver’s license restoration clinics inside prisons last fall and has now completed three, including 10 law students who spent part of their spring break helping 65 people at Western Correctional Center for Women on March 10 and Craggy Correctional Center on March 11.
Secretary Dismukes wants to keep ramping up the number of clinics held at prisons across the state. She said she hopes to partner with all of North Carolina’s law schools to make that happen.
For Treat, an attorney at Pisgah Legal Services, helping people restore their license is a crucial step toward stability and reentry success.
“I think it’s really just sort of almost negligent for us as a society to send someone home from prison without a driver’s license,” he said.
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