by Matt Clarke

On August 22, 2024, the federal court for the Eastern District of Kentucky sentenced Jesse Kipf to 81 months in federal prison for hacking into the Hawai’i Death Registry the year before. It was a strange crime; in his guilty plea, Kipf, 39, admitted to using the name and password of an out-of-state physician to access the database and create a phony death certificate for himself. He hacked into other states’ death registries, as well as private business networks using stolen credentials that he then tried to sell on the dark web before he was caught.

United States Attorney Carlton S. Shier IV said the reason was simple: Kipf owed $195,758.65 in child support. His goal in the crime, Shier said, was “avoiding his child support obligations.” See: United States v. Kipf, USDC (E.D. Ky.), Case No. 6:23-cr-00060.

Most people in the U.S. who are incarcerated for failure to pay child support didn’t commit a crime like he did in their struggle with a bill they found overwhelming. The number of such cases is not exactly known. Because child support enforcement cases usually fall under civil rather than criminal law, they are not often tracked by law enforcement agencies. But the number of parents who end up behind bars for nonpayment of support certainly dwarfs a Biblical “multitude”—translated from the Greek word for 10,000— and may well exceed 100,000. That represents a significant fraction of the more than two million people caged in the country, making nonpayment a significant driver of our mass incarceration problem.

What Statistics Are Available?

The few agencies that track prison and jail admissions for nonpayment of child support tell a jarring story. For instance, criminal nonsupport was the tenth most common sentence in Missouri’s Department of Corrections (DOC) in 2020, putting over 375 people in state prison.

But most of those incarcerated for nonsupport are held in jails so they are excluded from prison counts. In 2019, Buchanan County, Missouri alone filed 149 felony and 214 misdemeanor nonsupport cases. In 2022, Clay County, Missouri filed 99 cases, including 88 felonies and 11 misdemeanors. Given that they are just two of 114 counties in the state, it is easy to estimate that Missouri alone incarcerates thousands of people for nonsupport each year. At an average annual cost of $21,900 per state prisoner, the cost could easily exceed half a billion dollars.

A 2009 South Carolina survey found that one of every eight people jailed was incarcerated for nonsupport. In 2010, there were 3,500 people jailed in Georgia for nonsupport. Gwinnett County, outside Atlanta, incarcerated 3,612 for nonsupport between 2001 and 2011.

But the problem is not just in the South. Two New Jersey counties incarcerated 1,800 people for owing back child support in 2013. Marion County, Illinois incarcerates 2,400 to 3,300 people for nonsupport each year.

Around 2.2 million people are caged in prisons and jails throughout the U.S., and half of them have minor children. One-quarter of those—some 255,000 people—have a child support debt, according to the nonprofit Prison Policy Initiative. It is unknown how many of them were incarcerated specifically for owing child support rather than another crime. But extrapolating from these statistics, the number could easily be 100,000 or more.

Multiple Ways to Be Jailed or Imprisoned

Part of the complication in obtaining incarceration statistics is that there are multiple ways to be jailed for failure to pay child support. Nonpayment is often treated as contempt of the court that issued the support order—for which the court may issue an order having the nonpaying parent incarcerated. But there are two kinds of contempt of court: civil contempt and criminal contempt.

The goal of a civil contempt order is to coerce compliance with the court’s ignored order. Therefore, a person jailed for civil contempt is held only until compliance is achieved—by paying off or paying toward child support arrearages—or until the court determines that continued incarceration will not succeed in coercing compliance. Being jailed for civil contempt of court does not result in a criminal record. But that distinction also underlies a 2011 decision of the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) that a person facing civil contempt proceedings for nonsupport has no right to an attorney, like a person facing criminal prosecution.

“In particular, [the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment] does not require that counsel be provided where the opposing parent or other custodian is not represented by counsel and the State provides alternative procedural safeguards equivalent to adequate notice of the importance of the ability to pay, a fair opportunity to present, and to dispute, relevant information, and express court findings as to the supporting parent’s ability to comply with the support order,” the high Court declared in Turner v. Rogers, 564 u.s. 431 (2011).

Criminal contempt differs from civil contempt in that it is intended to punish a person for noncompliance with a court order. Unlike the open-ended sentence a person receives for civil contempt, which can be ended by simply complying with the court order, a sentence for criminal contempt requires a person to serve a set term behind bars and/or pay a set fine, regardless of later compliance. A conviction for criminal contempt also generates a criminal history entry.

The difference between the two types of punishment is that one for civil contempt “remedial, and for the benefit of the complainant”; punishment for criminal contempt, on the other hand, is “punitive, to vindicate the authority of the court.” See: Gompers v. Buck Stove & Range Co., 221 U.S. 418 (1911). Therefore, a criminal contempt punishment is “solely and exclusively punitive in nature,” as held in Penfield Co. v. SEC, 330 U.S. 585 (1947), contrasting with the remedial nature of civil contempt punishment.

All 50 states and the federal government have made it a statutory criminal offense to skip child support payments. It is also a federal crime to flee to a different state or jurisdiction to avoid paying child support under 18 U.S.C. § 228. Prosecution under these statutes are simple criminal proceedings and not intended to be remedial or to vindicate the authority of the court. Whether the offense is a felony or a misdemeanor is determined by the applicable statute and the amount of the payment owed or arrearage.

Does It Work?

There is no doubt that failure to pay child support is a national problem of enormous scope. In 2021, total national child support debt was estimated at $115 billion, of which less than $11 billion was paid that year. In 2018, 70% of the 15 million open child support payment cases had arrearages. Of those roughly 10.5 million cases, about 70% were owed by noncustodial parents earning less than $10,001 annually. Nevertheless, they were “expected to pay, on average, 83 percent of their income in child support,” according to a March 2019 study of noncustodial fathers in Wisconsin by the Institute for Research on Poverty (IROP). See: How are Child Support Burdens Related to Child Support Payments, Compliance, and Regularity?, IROP (March 2019).

Furthermore, 60% of parents with arrears of more than $100,000 had no reported income at all; the amount they owed represented 22% of the total arrears nationwide. In Florida in 2022, 568,556 delinquent parents owed an average of $15,621 in child support arrearages—a total of $8.8 billion. If the question is whether imprisoning these delinquent parents forces them to come up with the support payments they owe, the answer is, of course, no. Imprisoning a parent removes any possibility of significant wage labor income and results in additional crushing child support debt accrued during the course of imprisonment—not to mention incarceration-related debt, such as outstanding “pay-to-stay” fees for room and board accumulated behind bars.

Even a relatively brief stay in jail for civil contempt can result in the delinquent parent losing a job, car or even a home. After release, a prisoner with a huge child support arrearage has little motivation to seek legal employment when most of his or her paycheck will be garnished to pay for past missed child support.

The result is that people are driven into the underground economy, where transactions are made in cash and common financial instruments such as credit cards and bank accounts are not used. Income taxes are also not paid. Unemployment does not help a delinquent parent catch up on child support payments. But even lesser sanctions, such as suspension of state licenses to drive or practice a profession, do not result in paid child support debt. Instead, they cause delinquent parents to become unemployed or underemployed.

You can see this sorry tale play out in almost any county court in the country. A woman is there, perhaps with a child, perhaps with the child’s grandmother, who came along to help with caretaking. The young mom looks tired and stressed. A man on the opposite of the courtroom, the child’s father, looks just as anxious. A judge probes the parents for details about their income and assets, which are meager. He attempts to calculate a fraction that they owe for the child’s needs; it seems like nowhere near enough. Then it is split between the parents, and an order is gaveled into the record. No one seems happy. The judge says he doesn’t want to see the couple again, but his tone indicates what everyone knows: They’ll be back to squabble for crumbs leftover from trying to maintain two households on very low wages, with one or both of them always under the threat of jail.

How Did We Get Into This Mess?

The practice of incarcerating mostly poor parents for failing to pay child support is well over a century old. In 1910, the national Conference of Commissions on Uniform State Laws (CCUSL) approved the Uniform Desertion and Non-Support Act, which imposed criminal penalties on fathers who failed or refused to financially support their children. This was an early attempt to improve enforcement of child support orders, though it did not extend across state lines to follow parents when they moved to another state.

CCUSL attempted to remedy that loophole in 1950 with the Uniform Reciprocal Enforcement of Support Act (URCEA), which provided for civil or criminal enforcement of out-of-state child support orders. Yet UCREA’s commentary noted that returning a delinquent parent to his home state would have limited value: “If convicted, he would be placed in jail and the state would still have the burden of support of the destitute family. Even when free again, he would be under the heavy handicap of ‘a man with a criminal record’ in finding a job and supporting his family.”

States’ highest courts have long ruled in favor of giving state judges jurisdiction to enforce child support orders of courts in other states. See: Fanchier v. Ganunill, 114 So. 813 (Miss. 1927). Most have also upheld the use of equitable means, including contempt orders, to enforce those orders. See: McDuffie v. McDuffie, 19 So.2d 511 (1944); and Gibson v. Bennett, 561 So.2d 565 (Fla. 1990). Others have ruled against issuing a contempt order to enforce such foreign judgments once the child has reached the age of majority. See: Lieder v. Straub, 42 N.W. 11 (Minn, 1950).

The U.S. government first passed legislation regarding child support during the New Deal. In the 1935 Social Security Act, Congress established Aid to Dependent Children, later renamed Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). This federal program provided funds to state programs for “mothers’ aid,” which made monthly payments to families who met certain requirements. The threshold requirement was an absent parent, almost always a deceased father, from whom the family received no support. By the 1970s, though, the AFDC caseload looked vastly different: The majority of program recipients were families with children whose parents were separated, divorced or never married.

Congress then identified a link between “custodial parents living in poverty” and “absent fathers who did not pay support.” This narrative of the “deadbeat dad” propelled child support reforms in the 1970s. In 1974, Congress passed the Family Support Act (FSA), requiring states that accepted AFDC funds to establish and enforce child support obligations. With the FSA, the federal government began to signal its intent to transfer responsibility of child support “from the government’s safety net to the noncustodial parent.” The logical conclusion of this was the creation of the federal Child Support Enforcement (CSE) program, which changed the focus of government efforts from simply helping custodial parents receive court-ordered child support to ‘‘welfare cost-recovery.”

The “deadbeat dad” narrative only strengthened in the 1990s. Regardless of the reason, the term came to be applied indiscriminately to any noncustodial father who fell behind on child support payments. The public perceived these dads as people who could afford to make their court-ordered payments but simply chose not to do so.

The problem was that “deadbeat dad” was a trope, much like “welfare mom” and “crack baby” tropes also common to that era, with a small kernel of truth surrounded by enormous exaggerations and downright lies. It failed to take into account that most fathers who owed child support debt were unable to pay, not unwilling. This included fathers who were unemployed, ill, disabled, incarcerated, or simply unable to earn sufficient funds to make child support payments, which had often been based on a fictitious “imputed” income—drawn from area averages—that was much greater than what was actually earned.

The who system of child support received a comprehensive overhaul in 1996, when Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA). That ended the AFDC program and replaced it with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Importantly, funds no longer were paid directly to families by the federal government; rather, block grants were given to states to run their own “public assistance programs.” Moreover, any family receiving TANF benefits was required to assign its right to child support to the state. This gave the state a financial interest in collecting child support arrearages to recover its TANF expenditures. As a result, 20% of total arrears ended up owed to the government.

PRWORA also took adjudication of child support cases and automated it. Instead of judicial or quasi-judicial hearings, where a noncustodial parent could argue his ability to pay, his debt was calculated by a computer program and recorded in a database, from which payment orders were automatically generated. Most of these orders were enforced with paycheck garnishment, so that child support was withheld like income taxes—before the worker even know it was there to begin with. In some states, child support could be ordered retroactively for up to two years prior to the order being signed. Thus, the noncustodial parent might start out with a large unpaid child support debt.

This is why the “deadbeat dad” trope is so inaccurate. Surveys have shown that the vast majority of people with outstanding child support debt believe that they have an obligation to pay it. But the percentage of noncustodial parents who have the means to pay child support is very low. Despite this reality, the majority of coercive measures are designed to address this rare obstinance with widespread suspension of driving and/or professional licenses, jailing and imprisonment.

“The people we see in jail are not wealthy ‘deadbeat dads,’” said Sarah Geraghty, an attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights who represented a class of Georgia prisoners incarcerated for nonpayment of child support. “They are often working people who have lost jobs and become indigent.”

The sad reality, Geraghty said, is that “[p]arents who are truly destitute go to jail over and over again for child support debt simply because they’re poor.”

This has created a modern form of debtor’s prison, with a strange variation that depends upon the parents’ relationship. For instance, if a couple with a child is living together and job loss means the family has to apply for TANF, they are given the aid, and no repayment is required. However, if there is a child support order, and job loss leaves the noncustodial parent unable to pay the support, he is required to repay any TANF expenditures that the custodial parent needs during the term of unemployment.

What About Deadbeat Dads?

Although they are few in number, it is important to examine the reasons deadbeat dads exist. Most have issues with the custodial parent—such as denied visitation with the children—and see withholding child support as a way to coerce or punish the custodial parent. Statements like, “She won’t get any money from me until she lets me visit the kids,” or “She moved out of town, even though she promised not to, so I’m not giving her a dime,” or “She tortured me for ten years in our relationship so she’s not getting a thing from me but grief,” often come from noncustodial parents. The problem is that they do not have the authority to modify a court order to pay child support, thus they run afoul of the law and end up jailed for contempt.

Furthermore, unlike alimony paid to support a former spouse, child support is to support one’s dependent offspring who can’t support themselves. Withholding that support punishes children for the perceived transgressions of the spouse. A noncustodial parent with complaints regarding visitation should take them up with the court, not unilaterally decide to withhold child support. Some courts try to educate noncustodial parents about this and the consequences of nonsupport before it becomes a problem.

Notable examples of deadbeat dads include former Arkansas Republican state lawmaker Jeremy Hutchinson, who represented Little Rock as a state representative for two terms before serving two terms in the state Senate. He is the nephew of former Gov. Asa Hutchinson (R) and the son of former U.S. Sen. Tim Hutchinson (R), and Jeremy Hutchinson was jailed for failing to pay his ex-wife $515,579 in child support— a debt that ballooned to $620,142 after interest was added. The former lawmaker resigned from the Arkansas Senate after being indicted on bribery and tax charges to which he then pleaded guilty in 2022.

Another noteworthy example is singer R. Kelly, who was jailed on a civil contempt order until an anonymous donor paid the $161,000 he owed in child support debt. He was also tried on child sex abuse charges and convicted; he is currently serving a 31-year sentence in the federal Bureau of Prisons at the Federal Correctional Institution in Butner, North Carolina.

Modification of Child Support Orders

Since the 1986 passage of the Bradley Amendment, 42 U.S.C. § 666(a)(9)(C), child support orders may not be retroactively modified. This means that a person who, for instance, gets out of prison and discovers he has a huge child support debt, cannot get the debt reduced by the amount that accrued while he was in prison. However, a person who is imprisoned or becomes otherwise incapable of paying child support—perhaps due to loss of a job—can petition the court issuing the child support order for a reduction or suspension of child support payments. In that case the debt can be retroactively modified back to the date the petition was filed. This makes it imperative for a newly incarcerated prisoner subject to a child support order to immediately petition the court for a reduction or suspension of his child support obligation.

One interesting aside regarding the Bradley Amendment is that it also inhibits modifications of the order for fathers who later discover that they are not the child’s biological parent. This has happened many times for veterans serving overseas, prisoners and other fathers who suffered lengthy separation from their partners. Thus, the father is locked into years of child support for a child that is the result of his partner’s infidelity with little legal recourse.

Statutes of limitation on paternity claims can have the same effect of rendering it difficult for nonbiological parents to receive relief from unjust child support orders. In one of the most notable cases, Carnell Alexander was named as the father of a child when its mother made a welfare application. Through DNA testing, Alexander later proved that he was not the father. But the Michigan statute of limitations had by then expired, and the state still expected him to pay over $430,000 in child support arrearages. Kenya Rahmaan, author of The Child Support Hustle, helped Alexander file a complaint with the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement, and the case against him was eventually dismissed and the arrearage erased.

Rahmaan became an activist for child support reform after she received child support, which her ex struggled to pay. Asked during a hearing whether she wanted him freed or to remain jailed, she realized that she “had too much power over another person simply because we had a child together,” she recalled. She began working to get the case closed, but that “seemingly simple task ended up taking eight long years to complete,” she said. After earning a Master’s in Human Resources, she recorded her experiences in the book, which she has since turned into a social medial platform and website.

Imputed Income

Child support is supposed to be based in part upon the noncustodial parent’s ability to pay. This model falls apart when the noncustodial parent appears in court pro se (without a lawyer) or misses his court hearing.

Many courts operate under the judicial fiction known as “imputed income.” When the noncustodial parent either fails to show up at a child support hearing or shows up but fails to bring documentation of income earned, the court is allowed to impute an assumed income for him—based on a 40-hour work week at minimum wage or the median income of the state—regardless of the parent’s actual income. Child support courts generally do not accept the noncustodial parent’s testimony of income earned as sufficient proof without supporting documentation, but parents appearing pro se often do not know that they need to bring along that supporting documentation.

It was under these circumstances that Florida courts in 2021 could impute an income of $28,000 because it was median income for the whole state. Yet this does not take into account the fact that the median income varies within the state. For instance, it is $20,500 in Gainesville.

For racial minorities, the inequity is even greater as their median incomes are less than the median incomes of Whites; in Florida’s Alachua County, for example, Black households had a median income in 2023 of just over $44,000, less than two-thirds of the median White household’s income near $67,500.

This assumption of fictitious income is one reason Florida Eighth Judicial District Hearing Officer Samuel Stafford, who presides over child support bearings in Alachua and Levy Counties, opens the hearings with a warning: “There is absolutely no place in a court of law, especially when you’re pro se, for logic or common sense.”

The laws of most states allow courts to impute or assume the income of the noncustodial parent at least at minimum wage or the state’s median income, unless documentary evidence is presented. SCOTUS has held that a state statute allowing courts to assume an ability to pay child support in civil contempt proceedings does not violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. See: Hicks v. Feiock, 485 U.S. 624 (1988). That is a form of imputed income. However, the Hicks Court indicated that the same would not be true were the proceedings criminal in nature.

The obvious problem with imputed income is that poor noncustodial parents, who cannot afford a lawyer, may often be taxed with child support payments that far exceed their ability to pay based upon their actual income.

“Because less severe enforcement measures are effective against parents with the employment and income security needed to pay support, incarceration is effectively reserved for parents who cannot afford their payments,” said Vicki Turetsky, former Commissioner of the Office of Child Support Enforcement.

Yet if parents cannot afford their payments, “no threat of conviction and punishment [will] draw blood from that stone,” declared University of Kentucky Prof. Courtney Lollard. See: Criminalizing (Poor) Fatherhood, Univ. of Ala. Law Review (Dec. 2018).

Another potential legal fiction is “voluntary impoverishment,” when the court determines that a parent has voluntarily failed to obtain employment in order to claim an inability to pay child support. Many states consider imprisonment to be voluntary unemployment under the theory that the person intentionally committed the crime and thus intentionally impoverished himself. In 2017, President Barack Obama’s administration published new guidelines reclassifying incarceration as ‘‘involuntary impoverishment,” but as many as 14 states may not follow the federal guidelines and still consider incarceration as no reason to suspend or reduce child support payments.

The Consequences

Walter Scott, who was shot in the back while fleeing a 2015 traffic stop in South Carolina, remains the highest profile child support fatality; his flight was likely motivated by an outstanding warrant for failure to pay over $18,000 in child support debt. Scott had been incarcerated for nonsupport before and didn’t want to go back to jail.

Scott complained that enforcement of child support debt was the very thing preventing him from paying it off because, when he spent two weeks in jail over the arrearage, be “lost the best job [he] ever had.”

“Every job he has had, he has gotten fired from because he went to jail because he was locked up for child support,” said Scott’s brother, Rodney Scott. “He got to the point where he felt like it defeated the purpose.”

Scott was not the only victim sacrificed on the altar of nonsupport. Ryan Everson, 42, died in January 2023 at Missouri’s Clay County Jail, where he had been incarcerated for failing to pay $50 child support installments he couldn’t afford; 10 days later, he was dead. The sheriff’s office claimed the death was suicide, but his family said he was locked alone in a cell after suffering severe seizures. Everson had struggled for years with drug addiction, but instead of receiving treatment and help finding a job, he was locked in jail.

There are undoubtedly many other cases of people incarcerated for child support arrearages being beaten, even killed, or dying of medical neglect in U.S. prisons and jails. “If we want to make this gentleman a better parent, it doesn’t strike me that incarceration is the fastest, best path to achieve that,” said Clark Peters in reaction to Everson’s death. A professor at the University of Missouri’s School of Social Work and Truman School of Government and Public Affairs, Peters allowed that “we tend to get angry at these people and there’s good reason for that frustration, but frustration and anger aren’t good guide stars for good policy. The better path would be treatment. Let’s get him to a place where he can earn money in the legal labor market and then to a place where he can provide for his children.”

Alternatives to Incarceration

Suspension of driving and/or professional licenses is a common alternative to incarceration used when garnishment of wages fails. But like incarceration, license suspension can make it harder for a delinquent parent to earn the money needed to pay child support that he owes, much less to participate in the child’s life. Nonetheless, suspension of licenses is a widely used method to coerce payment of child support.

In 2019, there were 41,903 Missouri driver’s licenses suspended for nonsupport. “We think the vast majority of the 40,000 suspensions were people who literally cannot afford to make the payments,” said Phil Telfeyan, Executive Director at Equal Justice Under Law, which has litigated the issue in five states. “We’re not dealing with people who are refusing to pay and they have the money hidden away somewhere.”

In neighboring Kansas, there are 7,226 drivers who have a restricted license due to nonsupport. But their license allows them to drive to work or school, even if nowhere else. Texas and Pennsylvania have also taken steps to separate license suspensions from child support debt.

A 2012 study by the Center for Policy Research showed that simply reducing unpayable child support to make it manageable resulted in a large increase in the number of fathers paying their monthly child support. Studies in Maryland, Illinois and California showed that over 85% of previously noncompliant fathers began to keep up with their monthly child support obligations once they were given relief from unpayable debts and assigned a regular schedule of payments.

“These fathers are poor, period. Their arrears are uncollectible, period,” said Jacquelyn Boggess, a child support analyst for the Center for Family Policy and Practice. “They’ve never even met anyone who had $30,000.”

Tennessee is experimenting with suspension of voting privileges for nonpayment of child support. Virginia has tried publicly shaming those in arrears with newspaper ads. Although of questionable success, at least those programs do not carry the job-killing threat of license suspension and incarceration.

Ending incarceration and license suspensions for child support debtors who cannot afford to make the payments is a good idea. An even better idea is to get them the training they need to find a job. About half of the country’s states have established partnerships with local workforce agencies to help noncustodial parents find a job. Several states, including Alabama, Louisiana, Missouri, South Carolina and Texas, as well as D.C., have initiated “Fathering Court,” in which a judge can defer prosecution if a father—under the guidance of counselors, job coaches and other staff—agrees to gain the parenting, education and/or job skills to become employable and good, responsible parents.

Virginia began its Intensive Case Monitoring program in 2008. It puts people who owe child support on monitoring, instead of in jail, and requires participation in Club Reinvent meetings, where counseling on job hunting and parenting skills is offered. It has a success rate around 60%, and those in the program increased the amount of child support paid on average from $75 monthly before participating to $185 after graduating from the program.

Systemic Reforms Needed

Job and parenting training programs are a great idea for those facing prosecution for nonsupport, but what is really needed is a fundamental rethink of how child support is determined. First and foremost, the amount of child support should reflect the noncustodial parent’s income and change as that income changes.

“When people have orders that they can’t comply with, it doesn’t motivate them to work and pay. It does the opposite,” said Turetsky.

Unreasonable child support orders merely drive people into the underground economy where the child support goes unpaid, and the government cannot even collect taxes on wages that would otherwise be earned. Like license suspensions, it is a counterproductive practice that should be ended.

Incarceration should be reserved for the rare case in which the noncustodial parent possesses the means to pay child support but refuses to do so. In such cases, courts should be free to seize and sell the debtor’s property to pay off the debt.

In most European Union nations, the government simply pays child support then collects reimbursement from the noncustodial parent based on the ability to pay. There is no reason to believe that a similar system would not work in the United States as well. What appears to be lacking is the political will to implement such sweeping reforms.

“My main complaint is that the child support system is a welfare recovery system,” said Rahmaan. “It penalizes parents for being low-income and more than half the nation refuses to pass-through child support collected to those vulnerable families.”

Rahmaan believes that the child support system “should be replaced with an expansion of welfare and the child tax-credit.” As it is, she said, the system “is harmful to children and to fathers and needs to be, at the least, be deeply reformed, at the most, completely abolished.”

Regardless of what, if any, reforms are implemented, it must be acknowledged that jailing or imprisoning parents who are unable to pay child support is economically irresponsible. Not only does the government lose taxes it would typically collect from the parent’s earnings, it must also pay the child support and the cost of incarceration, which averaged over $32,000 per year in 2012. That puts a hefty price tag on waiting for reform; rather, the time is right now.  

Additional sources: Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Colorado Politics, Forbes, Kansas City Star, KERA, Louisville Courier-Journal, MSNBC, The Marshall Project, New York Times, People, Tampa Bay Times, WUFT 

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