Child Support Can Be A Serious Debt Problem
Readers may remember the controversial 2015 shooting of Walter Scott, a 50-year-old black man, in South Carolina. A policeman was convicted for murder in the case, after a video surfaced showing him shooting Scott from behind.
But few people ask: “Why was Walter Scott running away?”
The sad explanation: child support.
Scott had been repeatedly sent to jail for failure to pay child support. By the time of his death, he owed $18,000, and there was a warrant out for his arrest.
He had ended up in a vicious cycle: he couldn’t pay child support because he couldn’t hold a job, and he couldn’t hold a job because he kept getting thrown in jail for failure to pay child support.
According to Scott’s brother, Rodney, “The warrant, the threat of another stay behind bars and the potential loss of yet another job caused him to run.”
Scott was not alone in this debt trap. Between 1987 and 2017 the total amount of child support debt owed in the United States increased tenfold—from about $10 billion to $117 billion. At least 50 percent of it is owed by men with annual incomes under $10,000, many of whom have no income at all because they are incarcerated.
The number of parents currently in prison with child support debts is close to 800,000.
The problem is that legally, all indebted fathers are lumped into one category — the ‘deadbeats’ — irrespective of their circumstances.
“While every parent has a responsibility to support their kids to the best of their ability, the tools developed in the 1990s are designed for people who have money,” says Vicki Turetsky, the commissioner of the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement. “Jail might be appropriate for someone who is actively hiding assets– but not appropriate for someone who couldn’t pay the order in the first place.”
When parents cannot keep up due to low incomes, being unemployed, or having their child support order set at an unaffordable level , they often have little choice but to watch this debt grow. Child support arrears cannot be extinguished by filing for bankruptcy.
If child support goes unpaid for too long, state agencies may take drastic action to increase collections. These include seizing bank accounts, suspending driver’s and occupational licenses, and even incarcerating people.
In many cases, the noncustodial parent actually owes child support to the state. This happens when the government provides Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) to custodial parents who are not receiving requisite child support payments.
Once the government funds are distributed — which is a good thing – then the non-custodial parent becomes obligated to repay the state, with interest – which can get very ugly indeed.
One study in Massachusetts revealed that non-custodial parents entering prison owed an average of $10,543 in unpaid child support — and were likely to generate an additional $10,000 in arrears by the time they were released. One-fifth of the state inmates were estimated to generate arrears balances in excess of $30,000 while in prison. Another study of 350 parolees in Colorado demonstrated that they had an average balance of $16,651 in arrears.
Any repayments to the state are actually shared between federal and state agencies — as reimbursement for public assistance.
(This is a classic American example of forcing the beneficiaries to pay for social programs. It is like the insane Medicaid asset recovery rules or the brainless offender funding for the prison system itself. In order to save what amounts to nickels in taxation, we set up cruel and elaborate programs that effectively shake down the people who cannot protest or move away.)
In any event, when debtors like Walter Scott are tracked down and re-imprisoned for nonpayment, this just restarts a vicious cycle. The men often end up taking risks that expose them to further punishment, especially for those on parole or probation: i.e. working illegally, or driving on revoked licenses in order to get to court or their jobs.
This is a crazy, self-destructive system. We know that most of these men will never be able to repay their full child-support debts.
Child debt support reforms
One solution would be to go ‘full Nordic’ –i.e. a system of full financial support to all parents, paid for through taxes, with no personal responsibility for anyone.
However, there is a substantial constituency in the U.S. that does not want to make it ‘too easy’ for non-custodial parents. ‘Law and order’ policymakers insist that any sort of debt relief would reward bad behavior. They will oppose any relief that ‘gives prisoners a break’ from their obligations.
The moral approach simply is not working. According to national estimates, up to 50 percent of fathers with support orders have some criminal justice background and around 20 percent of nonpaying, indebted fathers were recently incarcerated.
Their debts to the state can hang around forever – and interest only makes them worse. More than 90 percent of arrears accrued from reimbursing TANF benefits are more than five years old; nearly half are more than 20 years old.
Reform Step One: At the very least, we must waive the interest on incarcerated parents’ support debt, Charging interest on a debt that parents have no capacity to repay is excessively punitive.
Reform Next Steps: As often happens in America, some states have stepped up and tried to improve things without waiting for federal reform. This includes:
Illinois child debt support reforms
Project Clean Slate provides opportunities for low‐income noncustodial parents to apply for forgiveness of assigned arrears — in exchange for making regular, ordered payments of current support to the custodial parent for six months.
The noncustodial parent must have demonstrated that they were unable to pay the assigned support at the time it was owed due to unemployment, incarceration, or serious illness.
Maryland child debt support reforms
The balance owed can be eliminated — if the noncustodial parent makes full child support payments for two years.
Consideration will be given for periods of unemployment due to seasonal work and no-fault termination.
Utah child debt support reforms
The Prisoner Forgiveness Program targets recently released prisoners and forgives state‐owed arrears for those who are approved for the program, and pay 12 consecutive months of current support plus a nominal amount toward arrears.
Wisconsin child debt support reforms
Local child support agencies may forgive all or part of the state-owed arrears under a variety of circumstances– including when the obligor is unable to pay based on income, earning capacity, and assets, or the obligor has a long-term disability.
Additional reforms to carceral debt
Many other forms of carceral debt should be outright cancelled, without any judicial review. This is especially for the penny-ante charges for prison phone calls, probationary supervision, or even for spending a night in jail. These charges are add-on amounts often unrelated to the crime, but used to generate revenue for criminal justice agencies.
Revenue is designated toward such things as retirement funds for sheriffs and peace officers, law enforcement facilities and training, indigent defense programs, and education and treatment programs.
God forbid that we might have to raise taxes for public services Our politicians campaign on tax cuts – simultaneous with “tough-on-crime” measures. But something has to give. Prisoner fees are a cruel and inefficient alternative to true public funding.
Consider the following real-life examples……
1. Rita Luse from Cleveland, Georgia received a traffic citation a few years ago and pleaded guilty to driving while unlicensed in the county probate court.
She owed a fine, and because she could not pay that fine when she appeared in court, she was put on probation with a private probation company, Sentinel Offender Services LLC.
She was placed on probation supervision although she posed no threat to public safety, making it difficult to conceive of any legitimate reason why her behavior would need to be monitored. Yet, under the system in Cleveland, as in so many places, Ms. Luse’s inability to pay a fine resulted in her having a “probation officer,” reporting to a probation officer, paying “supervision fees” and submitting her urine for drug testing at her expense.
On one occasion during the course of her probation, Ms. Luse, who did not have a lot of money, came up short. When she asked for extra time to pay, her probation officer told her that if she did not pay by the end of the day, a warrant would be issued for her arrest. Ms. Luse secured an emergency loan from a relative and raced across town to borrow money and convert the cash into a money order, fearful that she would be jailed if she did not deliver $140 to the probation office before closing time.
2. Thomas Barrett was homeless, but he was arrested for stealing a $2 can of beer.
When he was arrested, he refused to be represented by the county public defender because even indigent defendants in his county pay $50 for defense costs for people too poor to hire their own attorneys. He was fined $200 and sentenced to twelve months on probation with electronic monitoring. All this was to be supervised by the private probation company, Sentinel Offender Services, at a steep cost.
Although Mr. Barrett had been sentenced to probation, he spent almost two months in jail initially because he was unable to pay Sentinel’s $80 startup fee. Eventually, he convinced his Alcoholics Anonymous sponsor to pay his initial fees, freeing him from jail.
Once he was released from incarceration, the costs of his semi-freedom started to stack up. The electronic monitor cost him $12 a day, plus he had to pay $39 a month to be on private probation, totaling around $400 a month—a pretty steep monthly bill for most people, even more so for a guy who had to sell his blood to pay his $25 monthly rent. Eventually, it all became too much for Thomas to handle.
He started skipping meals and doing without some essentials like laundry detergent and toilet paper. But missing meals left him weak, sometimes making him unable to sell his blood. By February 2013, he had fallen $1,000 behind in his fees, five times his original $200 court fine.
Sentinel filed a technical violation on Barrett for failing to keep up with his fines and fees. His judge sentenced him to a year in jail for the violation –not for his original crime, but for his inability to meet the demands of the payment system.
We must end this disgusting offender-funded justice – and from the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary.