A Driving Dilemma: Examining the Community Impacts of Failure to Pay Driver's License Suspensions

Description

Driver’s licenses are central to many people's livelihoods, allowing us the ability to travel for work, education, healthcare, and all other essentials of life. Often, however, driver’s licenses are suspended as a means of enforcing traffic violations. About two years…

Driver’s licenses are central to many people's livelihoods, allowing us the ability to travel for work, education, healthcare, and all other essentials of life. Often, however, driver’s licenses are suspended as a means of enforcing traffic violations. About two years ago, Arizona significantly changed the civil traffic enforcement landscape in the state as it passed a law—S.B. 1551—that, in part, made it so individuals could no longer receive driver’s license suspensions for failing to pay a civil traffic fine. This study aimed to examine how this legal change has impacted civil traffic enforcement in Tempe, Arizona. As part of this work, I helped my thesis supervisor with overseeing student groups in one of his online courses in a research project that centered around studying the community impacts of driver’s licenses suspensions. I met with my thesis supervisor to coordinate how the project would be implemented, assisted students with learning how to use data analysis and visualization tools, and edited the paper of the student group selected as the top team so that they could share their findings with members of the Tempe Municipal Court. Coinciding with the research done by these student groups, I also conducted my own analysis, using traffic data provided by the Tempe Municipal Court to be able to determine how the passage of S.B. 1551 was affecting civil traffic trends related to failure to pay dispositions, if at all. Overall, I found that S.B. 1551 presented implications for both accountability and equality related to civil traffic enforcement. To the enforcement concerns, the number of failure to pay dispositions rose after the passage of SB 1551. With traffic fines being a central means for punishing and deterring traffic violations, people no longer being compelled to pay them may present issues for regulating traffic safety. However, this study also demonstrated that, had S.B. 1551 not been implemented, driver’s license suspensions for failure to pay dispositions may have disproportionately and adversely impacted communities in Tempe by socioeconomic status and race. Hopefully, this project can guide policymakers in setting civil traffic enforcement policy, taking into account both the enforcement and equitability implications, as well as to serve as a starting point for future research on the topic.

Date Created
2023-05
Agent

Community Reintegration of Former Female Offenders in the Arizona Valley: A Video Campaign

Description
Hope’s Crossing is a non-profit organization that serves formerly incarcerated and unsheltered women in the greater Phoenix community. Their mission is to help mitigate the disparity between men's and women's post-correctional care, recognizing that women bring unique issues that often…

Hope’s Crossing is a non-profit organization that serves formerly incarcerated and unsheltered women in the greater Phoenix community. Their mission is to help mitigate the disparity between men's and women's post-correctional care, recognizing that women bring unique issues that often go unaddressed. Their services include vocational training, group discussion and connection, volunteering opportunities, and clothing donations. While Hope’s Crossing was founded shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic, its service capacity and staff bandwidth have been hindered by its momentary closure. However, the positive morale of its CEO and founder, Laura Bulluck, employees, and Arizona State University (ASU) interns have propelled the organization in a new direction. The purpose of this creative project is to raise awareness of this new direction, thus helping this community resource to be more accessible to and utilized by those who need it most. My other goal is to help garner stakeholder attention, participation, and funding for long-term organizational expansion.
Date Created
2022-12
Agent

Adjustment of Status through Marriage: State Strategies of Control and The Power of Resistance in Immigrant Tactics

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Description
The primary question driving this research regards how individuals in mixed-citizenship couples employ different strategies and/or tactics to access and maintain valid immigration status during processes of Adjustment of Status through marriage in the United States. A dominant narrative prevails…

The primary question driving this research regards how individuals in mixed-citizenship couples employ different strategies and/or tactics to access and maintain valid immigration status during processes of Adjustment of Status through marriage in the United States. A dominant narrative prevails in the US that immigration through marriage to a citizen confers immediate or an easy pathway to citizenship. For roughly two-hundred thousand immigrant spouses that currently navigate adjustment annually, however, this narrative falls short of and obscures the reality of adjustment processes. There is a lack of focused academic study to help contribute to more accurate public understandings of what these realities are. To combat this false narrative and help fill a gap in research, this work examines how such dominant ideology stems from historic legal inequality and hegemonic discourse, reified through Enlightenment-centric thinking and becoming tangled with state power through Foucault’s conception of the body politic. The day-to-day actions, interactions, and transactions within the body politic and adjustment processes are then put into conversation with De Certeau’s strategies and tactics, providing a means for accentuating how individuals, society, and the state enact specific practices to support or resist Foucauldian technologies of oppression and control. As an exploratory case-study, this work engages four individual partners from two mixed citizenship marriages in a series of three semi-structured, in-depth phenomenological interviews each. Reporting is centered on participant’s histories and adjustment narratives, told through their own voices. Evidence supports that easy pathway public narratives are inaccurate, that adjustment processes assert state power on citizen petitioners and migrant spouses alike, but in different ways, and that they in turn enact complicated and intertwined strategies and tactics to achieve adjustment and resist the oppressive power of the state that is carried through adjustment processes.
Date Created
2022
Agent
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