Elephant in the room: Child support!

A recent story in the Wall Street Journal highlights a serious problem facing prisoners: child support payments. 

Writer Howard Husock focuses on Black men behind bars, and chooses to blame Kamala Harris for overlooking the problem. 

We take a much broader approach. This is a problem facing all incarcerated men, regardless of color, and attention to this serious problem should be extended to more than just political candidates. 

Here’s the situation in a nutshell. Fathers have no way of making child support payments while incarcerated. Then, when they get released, reality hits them in the face with a frustrating combination of a prison record plus child support payments. The National Institute of Justice reports that, “one of the biggest obstacles to reentry is the size of a parent’s child support debt, which averages $20,000 to $36,000, depending on the state and the data used.” 

So, these guys get out of prison, and if, with a stroke of luck they’re able to get legal employment, they’ll likely see their wages garnished to make good on payments. Those sums could be owed to the mothers, or perhaps to the state as reimbursement for welfare benefits. Faced with problems like that, it’s no surprise that some former prisoners return to a life of crime. That may be the only way they can raise that kind of money! And that, as well as failure to obey child-support court orders, can send these men right back where they came from.

The challenge is to figure out a way to break that cycle, because more than five million children have a parent who is or has been incarcerated, and at least 440,000 parents now behind bars have a child-support obligation! 

Hopefully the Husock piece will get the attention of not only politicians, but those already in public office. After all, modifying a child-support order is not the same as forgiving it. 

The WSJ is absolutely on target with its conclusion: 

“Seeking to extract child-support payments from ex-offenders who may have no history of legal employment or credit isn’t a practical step toward salvaging the life prospects of a large population, much less of fathers returning to their children’s lives and guiding those children toward better choices. Continuing to push these men into lives of crime certainly won’t help.” 

Amen and Amen!  

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