Residents in every state in the United States can lose their driver’s license or car registration because they owe debt to the state. At least eleven million people across the United States suffer these debt-based driving restrictions at any given time. Because Americans overwhelmingly rely on personal automobiles for transportation, states, by controlling access to driver’s licenses and vehicle registrations, use debt policy to control where and how people travel. And because these laws disproportionately affect people of color, primarily Black people, this kind of regulation props up racial segregation in both location and opportunity. This Article’s first contribution is empirical, descriptive, and prescriptive: it catalogs debt-based driving restrictions across multiple categories for all fifty states and the District of Columbia, provides a long overdue analysis of their harms, and proposes corrective legislative action.

The driving suspension laws that animate this project are not the first instance where the government has turned to debt policy as a mechanism of racial control. These laws are not an aberration, but rather the latest iteration of a long tradition of government actors using debt policy to expand physical mobility for White people and simultaneously constrict physical mobility for Black people. Tracing this thread across American history provides the basis for this Article’s second contribution—a theoretical one—that expands the traditional view of credit and debt as a mechanism of social and financial mobility to include an analysis of credit and debt as a force that acts on physical mobility. When we expand the lens to include debt policy’s effects on physical mobility, we also see debt policy’s differential effects on White and Black people in the United States. Thus, this Article begins a new conversation about debt and debt policy, one that interrogates debt policy’s racialized effects on physical mobility, freedom, and personhood.