City’S Restorative Justice Program Comes To County

A city of Spokane program to help suspended drivers regain their licenses will be back in gear and available for the first time to county residents.

Restorative Justice stopped taking participants in March when money ran out.

But $58,000 in city funding will allow the program to start up again at the end of August. And, thanks to a $47,000 county grant, the program will help drivers with suspended licenses outside the city limits.

The goal of Restorative Justice is to help low-income residents whose licenses have been suspended because they can’t pay their fines.

Without the program, suspended drivers are stuck in the Catch 22 of not being able to drive to a job to earn money to pay off their court fines.

Restorative Justice doesn’t accept chronic drunken drivers or career criminals.

Participants are set up with a payment plan based on their income and total amount of fines.

“We try to work with the individual because we’re here to help them get their license back, not to punish them,” said Lewis Allen a coordinating volunteer with the program.

Restorative Justice was created as a way to ease jail crowding. Two years ago, a third of the cases filed in District Court were for third-degree driving with a suspended license, said Howard Delaney, project coordinator for Restorative Justice.

In 1999, there were 2,153 District Court filings for driving with a suspended license, out of a total of 4,917 cases, according to the prosecutor’s office. Out of 6,469 Municipal Court filings last year, 2,357 were for suspended drivers.

“We’re putting licensed drivers back on the road, which means we won’t see them in court,” Delaney said.

The average participant in the program owes $2,000 in court fines. Some owe as much as $10,000, Delaney said.

The program, run mainly by volunteers and administrated by the prosecutor’s office, has been active for more than two years and is the first of its kind in the state.

Since the money ran out in March there’s been a backlog of 1,000 people who want to restore their driving privileges, Allen said.

Participants attend a series of meetings and classes on self-esteem, basic car care, job hunting and money management. They are required to make a minimum payment of $25 per month - to Municipal Court if they live in the city and to District Court if they live in the county. Some people pay fines to both courts.

After 120 days in the program, participants get a recommendation to the prosecutor’s office to have their licenses restored as long as they’re paying their fines and have car insurance.

If approved for reissue, the last ticket a participant receives is cleared from their record.

“People are getting on with their lives and becoming productive citizens,” Allen said. “We have people driving legally, with insurance, getting jobs, paying restitution, and they’re working on improving their family lives.”

Participants are kicked out of the program if they fail to make payments, attend classes, or are caught driving without a license.

“The whole purpose is to teach personal responsibility so people don’t fall back into the same patterns that got them there in the first place,” Delaney said.

Delaney said the program has been adopted by Lincoln and Pend Oreille counties and expects it to spread throughout the state.