September 24, 2018, Maxwell King and Matt Smith - The Philadelphia Inquirer
Anna Hollis, executive director of Amachi Pittsburgh, a nonprofit that works on behalf of the 8,500 children of incarcerated parents in Allegheny County, is closely watching the Pennsylvania state Senate calendar and hoping for the best.
She knows that many parents will lose their driver's licenses due to minor, non-driving-related offenses. The nonsensical result is that they also lose their ability to work, run errands, pick up children in after-school programs, and perform many other basic, parental duties.
In her job, Hollis has had remarkable success keeping families together and helping individuals return to productivity after completing a court sentence. But the driver's license suspension policy is such a barrier to further progress, she says, that she agreed to chair the Driven to Work Campaign, the statewide effort to eliminate automatic driver's license suspensions as part of sentencing, where appropriate.