Some States Are Cutting Poor Dads A Deal On Unpaid Child Support

Many states have opted for oppression when it comes down to child support debt. A few wiser minds are prevailing in a few places. When the state of Maryland wanted to reach dads who were behind on their child support payments, it started in the boarded-up blocks of West Baltimore, in neighborhoods marked by drugs, violence and unemployment.

In just four zip code areas, the state identified 4,642 people who owed more than $30 million in back child support. Most of that was “state-owed,” meaning that rather than going to the child through the custodial parent, it’s supposed to reimburse taxpayers for welfare paid to the child’s mother.

This is a source of great resentment for many men, who say they want their money to go to their children. But most who owe it can’t pay anyway, as they earn less than $10,000 a year.

“So even if we use taxpayer dollars to chase ’em down, and we catch ’em, right, and we go into their pockets, there’s nothing in there,” says Joe Jones of Baltimore’s Center for Urban Families.

Are they deadbeat?

Joseph DiPrimio, head of Maryland’s child support enforcement office, doesn’t like that expression. “I think that’s vulgar. I don’t use it,” he says. DiPrimio prefers “dead broke.”

“We’re talking about individuals that are economically challenged, they’re underemployed, but they want to do the right thing,” he says.

Unpaid child support in the U.S. has climbed to $113 billion, and enforcement agencies have given up on collecting much of it. They say too many men simply don’t have the money.

What’s more, research shows that high child-support debt can leave parents feeling so hopeless that they give up trying to pay it.

Breaking Through The Distrust

Like a growing number of state government officials, Maryland’s DiPrimio wanted to make parents an offer. But he needed their trust, and that was a problem.

Research shows high child support debt can leave parents feeling so hopeless that they give up trying to pay it.

And sting operations to round up parents who owed child support have happened all over the country, including Baltimore. In a typical ruse, agencies have sent fake letters telling parents they won tickets to a football bowl game, for instance — but when they showed up to collect, they were arrested instead.

To break through years of distrust, Maryland sent letters to parents with the logo of the Center for Urban Families, a nonprofit in West Baltimore that provides job training and other help to poor families.

They made this offer: If the parent takes the center’s month-long employment training course and lands a job, the state will forgive 10 percent of his or her child support debt. If they complete a Responsible Fatherhood program, the state will write off another 15 percent. One of the first persons to sign up was a mother, though the vast majority of noncustodial parents are men.

In a separate “debt compromise” program, Maryland will also write off 50 percent of a parent’s child support debt if they maintain monthly payments for a year.

Response has been slow. In two years, slightly more than 100 parents have signed on. Many of them attend fatherhood meetings like one held on a recent Wednesday night. Two dozen men — 20-something to middle age, in sweats and in suits — sit in a large square.

Some complain their exes won’t let them see their child if they haven’t paid child support. Others don’t understand why it doesn’t count as support when they take their kids out to eat, or buy them clothes — or say they would do those sorts of things for their kids if their child support obligation wasn’t so heavy.

Mostly, like 30-year-old Lee Ford, they say it’s so hard to find work

“You telling me no matter what, I gotta pay. But I can’t get a job to work to save my soul,” he says.

Group leader Eddie White cuts no slack. “If you know you got a criminal record, sure it’s gonna be hard for you to get a job. But it don’t mean you can’t work,” White says.

A big part of this class is also educational. White asks the men what a person who is paying child support should do if he gets laid off or loses his job.

“There you go, that’s the word. Immediately,” White says. “Immediately ask the court for an adjustment.”

Other Approaches To Debt Relief

Maryland’s program is part of a larger effort to keep impoverished parents from racking up child support debt in the first place.

Some states are trying to speed up the cumbersome process of adjusting an order when a parent loses a job. Ohio has experimented with sending simple reminders — by phone, mail or text — to parents who need to send in monthly payments. Texas has reached out to newly incarcerated parents, to let them know they can apply to have their payments reduced while in prison — something not all states allow.

“We sent out a teaser postcard trying to combat the ostrich effect,” says Emily Schmidt, a research analyst with the U.S. Administration for Children and Families, who helped with the Texas effort.

Schmidt says there was concern that someone going through the emotional transition of incarceration wouldn’t likely be thinking about child support, and may not even open a letter from the state. So they printed the postcard on blue paper to stand out, and, taking a cue from marketers, it said, “Four easy steps to lowering your child support.”

After 100 days, the response rate among parents was up 11 percent, “a very low-cost intervention for a fairly dramatic effect,” Schmidt says.

The Obama administration wants to “right size” child support orders from the start, and has proposed regulations to make sure they are set according to what parents actually earn. Officials say some jurisdictions base orders on a full-time minimum wage, even if a parent earns far less. They say this can backfire, leaving so little money after a parent’s wages are garnished that he or she quits and works underground instead.

The White House’s proposals also would provide more job training for parents with child support debt — something Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution says is a good investment.

“More fathers will get a job, more fathers will have earnings, and more fathers will use those earnings to pay child support,” he says.

So far, that’s what’s happened in Baltimore. The numbers are small. But the amount of child support that’s been paid is more than double the amount of debt written off.

Maryland wants to expand its child support debt forgiveness program, hoping to help more parents to pay what they can.

A Different Look on Law: Why Punish People for “Speeding”?

by Eric Peters

Why should anyone be subject to punishment merely for driving “x” speed? Is it not of a piece with punishing someone for merely consuming alcohol?

The justification usually given is that “speeding” might cause harm.

Ok, sure. The same is true about drinking beer. Someone (generally) might drink beer and beat his wife. But we do not presume (for now) that everyone who drinks beer willbeat his wife – and thus, drinking beer must be forbidden. And violators of this policy punished.

What about punishing (hold onto that thought) people when – and only if – they actually do cause harm? Not before – and not because they might. Or because “someone” else has.

It’s a crazy idea, I realize.

Imagine: You’d only have to sweat cops or face a judge if you (and not some other person you never even met) could plausibly be charged with having caused harm to an actual victim or damaged the actual property of someone else. Mark that. A flesh and blood victim would have to be presented.

And it would be the obligation of the courts to prove that harm was done to establish guilt before requiring restitution (much preferable to punishing people, which smacks of house training a puppy).

There would be an end to this business of people being put through the system who’ve harmed no one. Who are punished for manufactured offenses against the state.

Can the state be a victim?

Is the Tooth Fairy real?

It’s absurd – and vicious.

Do you feel guilty of wrongdoing when pulled over by a cop for not wearing a seatbelt? Who have you harmed? What justification – other than “it’s the law” – is there for punishing you?

How about driving faster than an arbitrary number plastered on a sign? You get pulled out from a crowd of others doing the same thing; none of you harming anyone or even plausibly threatening it. It’s merely your unlucky day. Your time to pay.

As the cop slides in behind you, does your internal monologue run along the lines of, “well, yeah… I did a bad thing… I deserve this.”

Or do you feel disgust, anger – and resentment?

Of course.

This has serious implications.

Laws without a moral basis are just arbitrary rules. They have no moral force – and that makes people subjected to them feel abused. Which they have been. Meanwhile, it also makes it more difficult to deal with the relatively small number of people in society who actually do cause harm to others. If you doubt this, take a drive into a “bad” neighborhood; where are all the cops?

They’re manning radar traps and safety checkpoints in the “nice” neighborhoods!

Remember the “Drive 55″ idiocy that lasted from about 1974 to 1995? Overnight – and for the next 20 years – it became illegal “speeding” to drive 70 when the day before it had been legal to do that and – presumably (being legal) “safe.” How does it become “unsafe” to drive 70 on the same road today that it was (apparently) “safe” to drive 70 on yesterday?

What was it Bob Dooole used to say? You know it, I know it, the American people know it.

Millions of people were simply ripped off – had their money stolen from them under color of law.

The contempt and corruption this bred is incalculable. It festers to this day. Because while “Drive 55″ is history, the same rigmarole exists on secondary roads. Every day, thousands of people are pulled over and literally robbed. Issued what amount to ransom notes – state-sanctioned extortion – for driving at reasonable and prudent velocities that happen to have been codified as illegal “speeding.” The fact that virtually every one “speeds” – this includes cops – is the clearest, most inarguable proof that the laws are absurd. And their enforcement a sort of low-rent sadism that also happens to be very profitable.

What’s the solution?

Speed limits as such ought to be thrown in the woods. They are arbitrary, morally indefensible – and most of all, one-size-fits-all.

People are individuals and some people are better at certain things than others. This includes driving. Tony Stewart is a better driver than I am. But I am a much better driver than my mother-in-law. Why should Tony Stewart be dumbed-down to my level?

And why should I be dumbed-down to my mother-in-law’s?

Imposing arbitrary, one-size-fits-all limits on anyone for anything is by definition unfair.

Arbitrary man-made “speeding” laws based on a dumbed-down/least-common-denominator standard amount to ugly and stupid people punishing the good-looking and smart ones.

The people who support such laws support anticipatory and pre-emptive punishment. That is, laws that assume something bad will happen if “x” is not punished.

And which punish the “offender” as if something bad had actually happened.

Even if it never did.

Innocence of having caused harm is (currently) no defense. It’s not necessary for the government to produce a victim. All that’s necessary, legally speaking, is for the state to prove that “the law” was violated.

Comrade Stalin would approve.

Cue the keening wail that, absent speed limits, people will drive excessively fast and lose control.

Yet they do exactly that already – speed limits notwithstanding. Just as people still drive soused (and senile, too).

The difference between the harm-caused/actual victim approach – and the “it’s the law” approach – is that the former only holds those who actually do lose control – for whatever reason – accountable. Everyone else is free to go about their business. To live as adults – rather than be treated as presumptively unintelligent children.

What a concept!

Speed advisories would be fine. For example a sign letting you know that there is a sharp curve ahead and maybe reducing speed would be good. Drivers unfamiliar with that road – and never having driven that curve before – may find this information helpful. But why should the local who is familiar with that road – and who drives that curve everyday – be subject to punishment for taking the curve at a higher speed?

Assuming, of course, that he does so competently, without causing harm to anyone in the process?

That was once the American Way. Not “do as you please” – the dishonest, demagogic bleat of Clovers. But rather, do as you please… so long as you don’t cause harm to others.

The false choice offered by Clovers is total control in exchange for total safety – the “risk free” world. But this is a quixotic quest that can never end, because risk cannot be removed from this life. We all get sick – and die eventually. Entropy happens.

What can be excised, however, is the risk to our liberties, our peace of mind, our enjoyment of life – presented by random and arbitrary interference and punishments based not on what we’ve done, but on what “someone” might do.

original article

Father’s Day – Money Is The Measure, Not Freedom

by J. Greene

Men have been honestly caring for their children from the beginnings of civilization. Some have not, including mothers. It has always been that way. We don’t live in a perfect world. Enter the modern state in all its’ wisdom, where all people are expected to tolerate a state-controlled legalized extortion racket because children are the future – but mostly for benefit of the state. The state even routinely combs through bank records in the eternal vanity of finding a few stray bucks from those that dare to evade child support collection. It’s an old game whose influence has steadily increased since the free love movement, when rancorous feminists began burning their bras and politicians saw the political cache they could achieve through social manipulation. As a result, the real role of fatherhood and the definition of a family has been continually cheapened.

In the corporation known as the United States, the system routinely oppresses fathers, while offering poverty support to single and divorced mothers (and some fathers). They have also been oppressing the taxpayer as well, hoping and pretending to bring in more than they spend, even as they send state corporations double their child support collections. Only the light-headed politicians of the United States would think to do such a thing. Of course, these are the same men and women that fund operations as the “policeman of world” while playing “Uncle Sugar” to the world. They even continue to send China a regular stipend because of its’ poverty, while running a burgeoning deficit that the children of the future are expected to pay. This is obviously unsustainable, despite the fact that they indirectly operate the printing presses that prop up the reserve currency of the world. In fact, this is the only reason that the lawmakers that rule “Uncle Sugar” can continue to operate as they have. The nation as it stands is living on borrowed time.

Since money is the measure in the propaganda that is cast about, you’ll find that fatherhood is measured the same way. This is no surprise in a nation mesmerized by the illusion of wealth. Social scientists at Johns Hopkins have decided that low income fathers purchase a relationship with their children.

“They want their kids to look down at their feet and say, ‘My dad cares about me because he bought me these shoes,’” says a co-author of the study in a press statement. “We need to respect what these guys are doing, linking love and provision in a way that’s meaningful to the child. The child support system weakens the child/father bond by separating the act of love from the act of providing.”

Yet, the child support system plugs along mercilessly despite a nation of earners that has not truly recovered from the economic debacle that eclipsed in 2008. Untold millions have been crushed, merely grist for the mill of poor governance. Republicans claim that we must find a way to be fiscally responsible, while supporting the current child support system that imprisons the nation. This is a lie pressed to ignorant people. They simply support the status quo with the illusion of conservative values. Their buddies are merely more “progressive.” Meanwhile, the men that give their blind consent can choose to pretend they are purchasing the adoration of their children, as these social scientists say, or they can realize the truth.

The family is only a family as long as the family unit is together. Once breached by rejection, separation and divorce, a family is not a family at all – especially outside of a committed relationship. That a single mother and her child is a real family is also debatable. The “wise men” of the nation have simply continued to revise the definition of the family to suit their needs. That is the deeper reality that the state would have you ignore to your continued peril. It benefits them for you to believe as you do.

It has been posited that the “Founding Fathers” would turn over in their graves if they were able to know about the ongoing debt slavery and legalized human trafficking that is the United States. I think not. These men were fully aware of the hypocrisy that “America” was built on. The governance of the nation has profited from the slavery and oppression of others from the very beginning with little apology, or admission of error. The lawgivers have even reconfigured the corporation to enslave for personal advantage. Robber barons everywhere continue the public plunder under the pretense of propriety and a kind face when it suits them. Your consent is your ignorance. Even governance is just another corporation. They seduce “the people” with infrastructure and social trinkets. The propaganda machine has continued to eject that notion that the nation is a democracy, the “land of the free.” Who the “free” truly are is for you to decide.

How the US Legal System Screws Poor Parents

A system full of flawed logic that winds up hurting children more than it helps them.

by Wendy Paris

Walter Scott wasn’t just a black man in America shot by a police officer; he also was a divorced father. While debate rages about excessive use of police force, his death points to another troubling practice—the incarceration of poor parents for failing to pay child-support.

For the most part, these are not “deadbeat dads”; they’re dead broke dads. Seventy percent of unpaid child support debt is owed by parents with no or low reported earnings, according to the Office of Child Support Enforcement. Their ex-wives often are poor, too. For these families, our punitive child support policies function like a de facto debtor’s prison for fathers. This, at a time when divorce, more broadly, has dramatically improved for many. While family scholars and journalists voice concern about a growing “marriage divide”—the way that marriage has become almost a luxury good attained by the “haves” and eschewed or effectively denied to the poor—a similar sorting is happening with divorce and co-parenting.

On the one hand, celebrities such as Gwyneth Paltrow seek conscious uncouplings. Upper- and middle-class couples seeking divorce in the US benefit from ever-increasing psychological, financial, and parenting resources. The law itself has improved divorce for many. New legal approaches such as mediation and collaborative counsel can make filing itself a mutually uplifting experience. These forms of “alternative dispute resolution” help adults make good decisions for everyone in the family, and steer clear of the divisive, anger-escalating spectacle of family court. Divorce can be seen as another awkward life passage, one that generates laughs, as on Bravo network’s new show The Girlfriend’s Guide to Divorce.

But if a family finds itself in court, the system seems stacked against the poor. “Many states have two systems, one for married parents and one for poor people/welfare cases that are funneled through ‘paternity dockets’ where they barely get to say a word,” says Daniel Hatcher, a professor of law at the University of Baltimore and a prolific researcher of and advocate for child support reform. “It’s a tribunal that’s just about child-support and paternity. It’s crowded. Judges are jaded. They face huge case loads.” As the trend toward unmarried parenting continues, especially among the poor, these paternity dockets look to grow even more crowded, meting out rushed decisions to more families.

While in court, a non-custodial parent, usually the father, may have a chance to explain to a busy judge his financial situation—perhaps he’s unemployed and worried about falling behind on rent. In many states, the judge can decide that this father could be earning minimum wage, impute that income to him, and set a custody amount he must pay the mother of his child as a percentage of his potential (that is to say, fictitious) earnings.

Maybe this obligation pushes him to scramble for a job. Perhaps it takes a few months. All the while, the child support debt has been accumulating. Now he has the monthly obligation plus back payment. (This is where the Bradley Amendment kicks in.) Some states terminate parental rights or throw a parent in jail or prison for back child support, or “non-compliance” with court orders. In South Carolina, the court can order the noncompliant father to appear to explain his delinquency, charge him $1,500 in the process, and jail him for up to a year. South Carolina is hardly an outlier. In Texas, a parent can be incarcerated even after he’s paid back his child support debt. (Texas is infamous for overcrowded courts, too. In one court in Harris County, Texas, a court master decided 500 paternity and child support cases in one day.)

Now the father is in jail; for some, like Scott, incarceration means the end of that great (or not so great) job. While in jail or prison, child support debt continues to mount in many states, some of which consider incarceration “voluntary unemployment.” In some states, you can apply for a child support modification while behind bars, but many parents do not know about this option, may find the process confusing, and may not realize their child support debt continues. Studies from a few states show that on average, a parent with a child support case enters jail or prison about $10,000 behind; he leaves owning more like $30,000. This debt is unlikely ever to be paid. The national child-support debt is more than $115 billion.

In South Carolina, if the non-custodial parent accumulates $500 in back child support while unemployed, the state can suspend or revoke his driver’s license as punishment. Say our unemployed father is a truck driver. Without his license, he’s lost his ability to work, and probably his sense of autonomy as an adult, and his willingness to cooperate with a system that’s working against him. As Scott’s brother Rodney told the New York Times, “Every job he has had, he has gotten fired from because he went to jail because he was locked up for child support. He got to the point where he felt like it defeated the purpose.”

Incarceration also prevents a parent from spending time with his children. Research from a variety of areas shows that when the non-custodial parent spends time with his children, he’s more likely to pay child support. Forty years of research on child development shows that children benefit from having a good relationship with both parents, or parent-type figures. Incarceration yanks a parent right out of a child’s life.

If a custodial parent—usually the mother—seeks Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF, the program that replaced welfare) or food stamps, both parents are treated like bad children. The mother is required to name the father, establish paternity, and sue the father in court for support, even if they have an in-kind arrangement that’s working. The pursuit of child support can destroy relationships. The money, if he has it, often goes back to the state for supporting the brood, not to his children. Meanwhile, the dads who can’t pay may find themselves in jail or prison, unable to help mom in other ways, such as picking up the kids from school or throwing a ball around on weekends.

The logic flaw baffles the mind, and hurts the heart, especially since about half of the nation’s back child support is owed to the government. In many states, child support collected in the name of the custodial parent receiving government aid does not go to that parent. It goes to the government instead, to pay for the cost of the food stamps of TANF. “The idea is that if we’re supporting this mom, we should be able to go after the dad to recoup this cost,” says Hatcher. “The guidelines don’t really work for these welfare cases at all. Most policy is driven by discussion about cases where both parents are working, middle class families on up; you plug in both parents’ income and then transfer to the custodial parent. That doesn’t make any sense when the money goes to the government.”

How have we arrived at these anti-family policies?

In the 1980s and ‘90s, the notion of the “deadbeat dad” loomed large in the public conscious, in part because of one spectacularly flawed and widely-cited study—since retracted by its own author—that purported to show divorced mothers subsisting at a third of their former standard of living, while the fathers lived better than ever. For many custodial parents, child support is the road out of poverty. Much child support went uncollected, and enforcement policies were changed to improve the situation. Some policies worked; the Office of Child Support Enforcement today still publishes reports showing continued gains in money collected. Threat of jail was considered a good motivator for delinquent dads, and it may be in some cases.

When it comes to the poor, however, these policies can create more harm than good. Maybe some fathers refuse to pay out of spite, while some mothers actively want their children’s father behind bars, if he’s violent, for example. But as research from a variety of areas shows, most of these poor families are fragile relationships, perhaps begun while very young, both people harboring hope for a future of stability and cooperation, even reconciliation or romance.

Old ideology probably contributes to our current policies as well—a view of faltering families that’s about as enlightened as something out of The Scarlet Letter. In England, Elizabethan Poor Laws of 1601 authorized towns to sue fathers of unwed mothers to reimburse them for assistance provided to their children. Early “bastardy acts” allowed colonies to incarcerate pregnant unwed mothers to protect the state from the financial burden of the child. Today’s laws are not as different as you’d expect. Lurking underneath lies an entrenched view that fathers are the lazy enemies of their own families, and poor mothers, in some way brought this on themselves. (You see this kind of view in the comments section of a recent piece in Concurring Opinions by law professors Naomi Cahn and June Carbone on the child support link in the Walter Scott affair.)

Some of the resources benefitting middle and upper-class divorcing couples help the poor, too. Technology, for example, allows those across the economic spectrum to read about their state’s laws online and access forms without shelling out for a lawyer. Courthouses around the country now have staffed self-help centers to guide pro se litigants (a.k.a. the do-it-yourself divorcees) through the paperwork. Increasingly, lawyers offer “unbundled” services, a consultation on an hourly basis. Most states have parenting classes and workshops for divorcing parents. Surveys show, and casual conversation confirms, wide satisfaction with these workshops.

But unmarried parents as a group get fewer resources, and if one parent sues the other in court, the kind of Orwellian child support laws that dogged Walter Scott kick in across the states. The overarching principle is the best interest of the child (a legal myth), but this aim gets subverted in policies that hurt the whole family.

There are solutions, the most promising of which take a problem-solving, rather than punitive approach. In Virginia, child support enforcement workers have begun reaching out to employers to find work for non-compliers, rather than more jail time. The state also has retooled its child support guidelines and begun launching programs aimed at helping poor fathers improve job-hunting and parenting skills. Some states have experimented with assessing child support only if a non-custodial parent has a minimum reserve of income. States, including California and Ohio, have passed statutes requiring the exercise of discretion rather than automatically referring certain child welfare cases to child support enforcement services.

In Maryland, Hatcher has worked on legislation to allow the state to automatically disable child support arrears during incarceration. This reform passed, but is not widely enforced. Hatcher notes that one stumbling block to reform is poor communication between child support enforcement and the criminal justice system.

This problem of poor communication—long the dominion of marriage counselors—is one I’ve seen repeatedly in my own research on divorce. I’d assumed that bad divorces result from a dearth of good ideas, but found instead that there are creative, humane solutions coming from a variety of states and various disciplines— and abysmal communication of them. In divorce, as in marriage, good communication may be the best way to suture a gap.

The Answer to US Child Support: Give Them An Ankle Bracelet

from the Desoto Times Tribune by Robert Lee Long

A father thrown in jail for child support is unable to work to pay that debt and often loses his job. It’s a vicious cycle that is repeated time and time again. A recent New York Times article highlighted the issue of fathers who fall behind on child support, only to be incarcerated and unable to work, falling further and further behind in catching up.

For DeSoto County Jail Administrator Chad Wicker, the problem hits close to home. As a child of divorced parents, Wicker witnessed the problem firsthand. When his father fell behind in making child support payments, his mother could not collect on back child support because he lived in Texas. (Who knows how long ago this was? The Bradley Amendment is never discussed in these articles.)

States do not have reciprocal agreements to detain or arrest so-called “deadbeat dads” for overdue child support, according to Wicker.

“The problem with the dads who owe back child support is they keep coming back time and time again,” Wicker said. “We have some guys in custody who owe $70,000 or $80,000 and they are never in a position to pay it off.”

Ex-spouses of so-called “dead-beat dads” are also at a disadvantage. “Many times, the state does not get involved unless the mother is on government assistance,” Wicker said. “She can hire a private attorney or a private investigator to help her, but 99 percent of the time when a father who owes back child support gets arrested it’s because the state has a compelling interest in its litigation.”

Wicker said at the DeSoto County jail, men who have been arrested and jailed for owing back child support comprise 5 percent of the total jail inmate population but make up 40 percent of the jail’s non-violent offenders who are incarcerated.

“We usually keep between 10 to 20 in custody at any given time and for instance, today (Friday) we had a jail inmate population of 306,” Wicker said, adding 62 inmates were released Thursday following court-imposed adjudications of their sentences. According to Wicker, it costs $49.37 cents a day to house and feed an inmate.

Men who owe back child support quickly fill up beds in the jail once they again fall behind, according to Wicker. “Typically what happens is that you can go to jail if you are $2,000 behind,” Wicker said. “When you pay $400 a month, it doesn’t take long to get further behind if you get arrested and put in jail.”

Though jail is considered an effective incentive for parents who are able to pay, critics say punitive policies do not work for those who are poor, as the New York Times article points out.

A case in point was the South Carolina man, Walter L. Scott, an African-American man who was pulled over for a broken tail light by a white Charleston, S.C. police officer. It was discovered by the police officer that Scott owed more than $18,000 in back child support and was likely headed back to jail. Scott bolted and ran and was shot in the back several times as he fled by the police officer, an event which touched off riots and protests in several American cities.

According to Sarah Geraghty, who was quoted in the New York Times article on the subject, poor people are often jailed over and over again in greater numbers for back child support in disproportionate numbers than those who have an ability to pay. “Parents who are truly destitute go to jail over and over again for child support debt simply because they are poor,” Geraghty was quoted in the New York Times article as saying.

According to the New York Times, a 2007 Urban Institute study of child support debt in nine large states found that 70 percent of people in arrears were “owed by people who reported less than $10,000 a year in income.”

In Scott’s case, he spent two weeks in jail and lost his $35,000-a-year job at a filmmaking company, in addition to sending him into an emotional and psychological spiral. Scott is now dead and obviously unable to pay not only any debt to his second wife and their children but any supposed debt to society.

DeSoto County Sheriff Bill Rasco said he would like to see these incarcerated fathers out working than taking up badly needed jail beds in his facility. “If they have a job, I would like to see them on an ankle bracelet and keep them on the job,” Rasco said. “It would help them and their families and help us keep our numbers down. If they lose their job, they’ll never catch up.”

———-

It’s bad enough to be labeled a ‘deadbeat’ or actually be dead, but the US has become so legally radicalized that ‘authorities’ believe that ankle bracelets are an answer, as if jail has ever been an answer. Coercion and fear are obviously what this is about, not about any pretense at a solution. It all about corporation exploitation by the state.  Imagine – the US considers itself superior in the battle for ‘human rights.’ Fathers are little more than a paycheck, and that’s the way the state likes it. Surely, the founding fathers of this nation would turn over in their graves, that is, if they were able. – MJR

Obama & New Police Reform

reposted from Canada Free Press by Moody Jim Rathbone

Mayors and city councils—in office largely courtesy of public apathy—are President Barack Obama’s boots on the ground in the ongoing, carefully orchestrated racial riots coming soon to a city near you. In their bid to rescue America from total Marxist eclipse, patriots, as it turns out, have been knocking on the wrong door.

Republicans, who surrendered to the Democrats even after taking over House and Senate in last Midterm elections, have no dog in the racial riots in Ferguson, Baltimore and other cities, but Mayor Stephanie Rowlings-Blake, who ordered a police stand down in Baltimore, and a bevy of other Democrat mayors, do.

With the undercover help of activist municipal mayors and councils, Obama seeks not to reform the nation’s police—but to totally replace them.

While diverting public attention by snubbing senators, and overriding both Constitution and Congress, Obama is now hammering the final nail in the Fundamental Transformation of America coffin.

It’s a mission aided and abetted by mercenary ‘civil rights‘ activists Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, and one largely conducted out of sight with White House help.

Local civic elections consistently have the lowest voter turnout, yet represent the level of government that poses the biggest threat to liberty and freedom. It is through complicit mayors and councils that the United Nations has been able to forge the road to Agenda 21 for all of Western society. here

As incredible as it may seem, it is with the cooperation of municipal politicians that Obama will get to replace every police force in the United States with a more military styled one that is answerable only to him.

‘We the People’ should have seen Baltimore and Ferguson coming on July 2, 2008, when Obama boasted in Colorado Springs, CO:  “We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”

Most assumed he was talking about the military, which he soon began to hollow out.

Few realized the most anti-American president ever elected had his sight fixed on replacing thousands of police forces across the country, whose job it has always been to keep the public peace, with his own military-style police.

It’s the return of Fidel Castro, only this time in America.

By ridding the nation of its traditional police forces, Obama and his army of activist municipal politicians will be tossing into the trash can first responders who happen to wear the Serve & Protect badge.

Getting there has been Marxist Community organizing all the way.

First came the smear job spreading the fallacy that police deliberately profile only young blacks, and are addicted to the habit of randomly shooting them. Marxist propaganda leaves the disingenuous impression that racist rogue cops dominate most police forces.

Within days of the Baltimore riots, Obama made it clear he wouldn’t be surveying the damage; wouldn’t be lifting a finger to call for calm.

He didn’t have to with the mayor doing his dirty work.

One hundred police officers were injured in the Baltimore riots. Businesses up and running only the day before were left in burnt-out rubble, facts carelessly written off by Obama.

Obama’s reaction to what’s going on in Baltimore has been expressed in words as casual as they are well crafted:

“The communities in Baltimore that are having these problems now are no different from the communities in Chicago when I first started working” as a community organizer, Obama said. “I’ve seen this movie too many times before.” (National Journal, April 29, 2015)

The difference now is that it’s Obama directing the racial riot movie.

With the Republicans snoozing at the switch, and most unsuspecting folk not knowing that Obama’s boots on the ground are the municipalities, what’s going to stop him from accomplishing his latest mission?

Obama counts on the same kind of apathy that dogs municipal elections about racial riots that are being staged, right down to including outside protesters being rushed in to the scene of the riots.

Like in televised episodes of Hill Street Blues, when the Black Arrows, Shamrocks and Los Diablos came together when there was something in it for them, the Bloods, the Crips and the Nation of Islam came together in Baltimore.

That coming together of the three parties was unprecedented.

Yet, instead of asking why the Bloods, the Crips and the Nation of Islam would come together during the Baltimore riots, Rowlings-Blake thanked the Nation of Islam.

Talk show radio giant and patriot Mark Levin points out that Rowlings-Blake was in constant touch with chief Obama advisor Valerie Jarrett throughout the riots.

By throwing gasoline on the racial discord gathering steam in American cities, is Obama sending a message to America’s foreign enemies that the U.S. is now at its most vulnerable for a strike?

Are internet commenters like Richard Jackson who posits: “I think the riots are simply programming people to get used to a military presence (instead of police) and curfews, etc. for something bigger later on”, on the right track?

Should edgy folk be watching the Jade Helm 15 large-scale military exercise to be played out from July 15 to November 15, across seven states, with thousands of locals “participating or role playing in the exercise” wearing I.D. markings be watching the military instead of passively letting the military watch them?

Meanwhile, speaking to a group of schoolchildren at the Anacostia Library in Washington, D.C., on Thursday, Obama said he might return to community organizing.

In truth, his plans to nationalize America’s police forces, prove he’s never left it.

The Character Assassination Of Black Men

reposted from ThinkProgress by Moody Jim Rathbone

On Wednesday, the Washington Post obtained a Baltimore Police Department document, which states that a prisoner in the vehicle transporting Freddie Gray heard Gray “banging against the walls” and “intentionally trying to injure himself.” The Post was given permission to publish the information, provided that the name of the witness remained anonymous, yet the newly-released details counter previous reports about the events leading up to Gray’s death. What is consistent, however, is police departments’ selective release of information that paints people injured or killed by police in a bad light — and mainstream media’s decision to buy into it.

Since Gray’s death, BPD’s missteps in arresting him have been well-documented. In widely-publicized videos of the arrest, Gray yells in pain as three officers drag him to their van. They refused to give Gray, an asthmatic, an inhaler. They didn’t put his seatbelt on. And sometime between his arrest and hospital admission, Gray’s voice box was crushed and his spinal cord severed.

But of all the documents compiled during the course of BPD’s investigation, the one given to the Washington Post offers a different narrative: that Gray injured himself. That document minimizes officer responsibility for the 25-year-old’s death, and it’s emblematic of a larger police strategy to deflect blame.

In some instances, officers make false claims that are eventually disproved. Before video of Officer Michael Slager shooting Walter Scott in the back surfaced, North Charleston police claimed Scott grabbed Slager’s Taser and attempted to use it. The Cleveland Police Department said Tamir Rice was sitting at a table, was told multiple times to put his hands up, and reached for his gun before officers shot and killed him. Video later disproved the department’s claims.

In other cases, police disclose background information that has nothing to do with the encounters in question, but which seems to undermine the character of someone who is no longer alive to defend themselves. Sanford Police told the Orlando Sentinel that, prior to his death, Trayvon Martin (who was killed by a private citizen and not a police officer) was suspended for an empty marijuana baggie. In the case against Officer Johannes Mehserle, who shot Oscar Grant in the back while he lay on a train station floor, defense attorneys brought up Grant’s criminal background and history of resisting arrest.

Other times, officials reveal details that fuel local outrage. After Brown was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson, the Ferguson Police Department released a video of Brown robbing a convenience store. The day before, Captain Ron Johnson took to the streets in solidarity with peaceful demonstrators, and many believed the tide was turning. However, the ill-timed release of the video was subsequently perceived as a power play to distract from Brown’s death.

But cops aren’t the only group to affect smear campaigns against victims of lethal police force, as evidenced by the Post’s decision to publish the BPD document. As noted by Al Jazeera, the New York Times published an article about Brown’s recreational activities, saying “he dabbled in drugs and alcohol” and detailed his “rebellious streak.” The Associated Press tweeted that Renisha McBride, who was shot and killed by a Detroit homeowner, was intoxicated. CBS and NBC reported that Scott had a bench warrant for missing child support payments. Northeast Ohio Media Group detailed Rice’s father’s history of domestic violence.

And since the Washington Post article was published last night, people have taken to social media to express their anger:

WaPo isn’t simply smearing someone murdered by police, they are profiting off of smearing someone murdered by police. #FreddieGray

— Remi Kanazi (@Remroum) April 30, 2015

So the Washington Post reports an unnamed prisoner is claiming #FreddieGray willfully injured himself in transport van. For real y’all.

— ReBecca Theodore (@FilmFatale_NYC) April 30, 2015

Complete takedown of the lies spread by the Baltimore Police & Washington Post on #FreddieGray http://t.co/N0aYK0ZETe pic.twitter.com/QALCmbKQOu

— Shaun King (@ShaunKing) April 30, 2015

Taxpayers Pay for Road Signs to Shame ‘Deadbeats’

by Moody Jim Rathbone

If you are a non-custodial parent, you’ve probably heard it before. When you find yourself behind in child support you are automatically labeled a deadbeat by certain authorities and those with an axe to grind. After all, they are ‘entitled’ to your cash any way they can get it.

Nationally, some ‘public officers’ have taken it on themselves to disgrace the public ‘deadbeats’ in their jurisdiction at your expense. In a new program, those in Northumberland County Pennsylvania are likely to find their faces on a billboards. The county may lease four billboards for $700 a year and post photos to shame those who owe the courts nearly $20 million in fines and child support. Commissioner Vinny Clausi loves the idea.

“I am 100 percent supporting this. These guys have been doing everything they can to collect this money. We have tried for years to get these people to pay, and I believe that the efforts between the cost collections team and the constant pressure the group is applying to the deadbeats who refuse to pay is something we need in this county.”

You remember who is paying for the signs, regardless of any perceived return on investment. The taxpayer is paying for the signs. Regardless of whether it comes from federal money or state money, they are pulling it from the tax base somewhere. This is because corporate government supposedly doesn’t make any money, even though this is a cultural lie. Corporate government is all about making money since virtually all government offices and courts are incorporated. They make money, even when they don’t. That is why they believe they can afford billboards with the intent of shaming local residents into submission.

Just remember, regardless of what Vinny and others in ‘public service’ say, taxpayer money is being used to fund the venture for a measure that is Constitutionally illegal. Due process has been vacated. No matter. Child support law is unconstitutional, but Federal family law statute has overcome that. Officials believe it is their God-given right to oppress those that owe them – publicly, and at your expense. This is also at the expense of your grandchildren as well, since the nation is running a budget deficit. That’s just good business. Right?

Technically, Vinny and his ilk are the deadbeats.

People with outstanding warrants can avoid arrest or jail for failure to pay child support if they surrender, court officials say in Pennsylvania. The amnesty program will not forgive outstanding child support, but will give parents a chance to make arrangements to pay what they owe.  Some amnesty. It’s illegal and lawful. How’s that for American jurisprudence?

Walter Scott and the Need for Child Support Reform

by Joy Moses

Walter Scott’s death was striking because a police officer fired eight shots at him while his back was turned. When something so tragic occurs, observers tend to wonder why. The officer’s actions and utter disrespect for human life can never be justified. But recently, the New York Times published new information about Scott’s split second decision to run — his child support case. According to his brother, “Every job he has had, he has gotten fired from because he went to jail because he was locked up for child support.”

Elements of Scott’s story reflect existing concerns about the child support system. A debate over potential large-scale reform is more than a decade overdue. The seeming impossibility of change has always loomed ominously large, overshadowing calls for reform and pushing them into the dark corners of the policy world. However, at this current political moment, there are national conversations about policing, bipartisan criminal justice reforms and an existing White House initiative focused on men and boys of color — concepts that would have seemed laughable just a few short years ago.

child support can make a man indigent

There are some fathers who absolutely refuse to care for their children and they should be held accountable. However, the current system reaches well beyond that group, creating negative consequences for men who are rarely credited with being caring parents and are simply too poor to pay. The political explosiveness of the “deadbeat dad,” a figure that some researchers say sprang out of the same sources as his female counterpart (the “welfare queen”), helped distort the foundations of child support policy. The system seems to partially rest on underlying beliefs that low-income men, and especially those who are black, avoid work and financially providing for their children at all costs while also being permanently childlike and in need of both discipline and lessons on how to behave.

Over the years, the program has effectively served many families (transferring funds from one parent to another) for which it should be applauded. However, policies built on a foundation of stereotypes about numerous men who don’t want jobs stand in stark contrast to the reality of numerous jobs that don’t want the men. Researchers like William Julius Wilson (More Than Just Race), have documented decades long trends of disappearing job opportunities for low-skilled workers as well as increased criminal justice involvement which further leads to employment discrimination.

When entities spend significant time on activities that fail to help and that actually hurt parents and families, it’s often useful to redirect their energies elsewhere. Reforms should shift the program mission and values away from damaging racial stereotypes that hurt families of all races and towards efforts to accurately diagnose the needs of families and take ‘pro-social’ action to address them.

One useful primary goal would be to comprehensively address the family law needs of low and middle-income families, helping with a very real challenge — the increasing and extraordinarily large number of families who can’t afford an attorney or who don’t feel comfortable representing themselves in legal matters. In doing so, agencies should assume that parents of all racial and class groupings share in a desire to care for their children, suggesting that they be treated with respect and provided with quality customer service. This would build upon efforts to accurately identify bad dads whose non-payment is rooted in an adamant refusal rather than their economic circumstances.

With such a vision, services would start to look much different. No longer treated as enemies of the state, low-income fathers would be less likely to literally and figuratively run away from child support. The sole focus wouldn’t be on a father’s monetary value but on improving father-family relationships. Court decisions and unaddressed legal needs would be replaced by model practices like mediation that support mothers and fathers in making their own decisions for their families. Punishments like imprisonment would be replaced by employment assistance. And other proposed reforms designed to guarantee child support for women and children would avoid potential incentives to hound men for unaffordable reimbursements of funds states pay out to women and children.

Some states have already experimented with such reforms, finding positive results that have included increased child support payments by fathers and greater parental satisfaction with agency services. The Obama Administration has encouraged states to adopt these best practices while proposing helpful new rules. However, there are limits to the changes that can occur without Congress overhauling currently existing state requirements and incentives.

We need a fruitful, progressive conversation that abandons a focus on the status quo and reform efforts that toy around existing edges — instead choosing a new vision for the future that endeavors to do the hard work of changing the culture and functioning of a system that means so much to so many.

—-

Of course, there is no mention in this article about U.N. Treaty or the Bradley Amendment, which prohibits child support arrears from being changed or removed – but the article does pretend to care (and is much kinder than I am). Meanwhile, the welfare queens still have control over America at great cost to all Americans. – MJR

Skip Child Support. Go to Jail. Lose Job. Repeat.

by Framces Robles and Shaila Dewan

By his own telling, the first time Walter L. Scott went to jail for failure to pay child support, it sent his life into a tailspin. He lost what he called “the best job I ever had” when he spent two weeks in jail. Some years he paid. More recently, he had not. Two years ago, when his debt reached nearly $8,000 and he missed a court date, a warrant was issued for his arrest. By last month, the amount had more than doubled, to just over $18,000.

That warrant, his family now speculates, loomed large in Mr. Scott’s death. On April 4, he was pulled over for a broken taillight, fled on foot and, after a scuffle with a police officer, was fatally shot in the back.

The warrant, the threat of another stay behind bars and the potential loss of yet another job caused him to run, a brother, Rodney Scott, said.

“Every job he has had, he has gotten fired from because he went to jail because he was locked up for child support,” said Mr. Scott, whose brother was working as a forklift operator when he died. “He got to the point where he felt like it defeated the purpose.”

Walter Scott’s death has focused attention not just on police violence, but also on the use of jail to pressure parents to pay child support, a policy employed by many states today. Though the threat of jail is considered an effective incentive for people who are able but unwilling to pay, many critics assert that punitive policies are trapping poor men in a cycle of debt, unemployment and imprisonment.

The problem begins with child support orders that, at the outset, can exceed parents’ ability to pay. When parents fall short, the authorities escalate collection efforts, withholding up to 65 percent of a paycheck, seizing bank deposits and tax refunds, suspending driver’s licenses and professional licenses, and then imposing jail time.

“Parents who are truly destitute go to jail over and over again for child support debt simply because they’re poor,” said Sarah Geraghty, a lawyer with the Southern Center for Human Rights, which filed a class-action lawsuit in Georgia on behalf of parents incarcerated without legal representation for failure to pay. “We see many cases in which the person is released, they’re given three months to pay a large amount of money, and then if they can’t do that they’re tossed right back in the county jail.”

There is no national count of how many parents are incarcerated for failure to pay child support, and enforcement tactics vary from state to state, as do policies such as whether parents facing jail are given court-appointed lawyers. But in 2009, a survey in South Carolina found that one in eight inmates had been jailed for failure to pay child support. In Georgia, 3,500 parents were jailed in 2010. The Record of Hackensack, N.J., reported last year that 1,800 parents had been jailed or given ankle monitors in two New Jersey counties in 2013. (The majority of noncustodial parents nationwide are men.)

Unpaid child support became a big concern in the 1980s and ’90s as public hostility grew toward the archetypal “deadbeat dad” who lived comfortably while his children suffered. Child support collections were so spotty that in the late 1990s, new enforcement tools such as automatic paycheck deductions were used. As a result, child support collections increased significantly, and some parents rely heavily on aggressive enforcement by the authorities.

But experts said problems could arise when such tactics were used against people who had little money, and the vast majority of unpaid child support is owed by the very poor. A 2007 Urban Institute study of child support debt in nine large states found that 70 percent of the arrears were owed by people who reported less than $10,000 a year in income. They were expected to pay, on average, 83 percent of their income in child support — a percentage that declined precipitously in higher income brackets.

In many jurisdictions, support orders are based not on the parent’s actual income but on “imputed income” — what they would be expected to earn if they had a full-time, minimum wage or median wage job. In South Carolina, the unemployment rate for black men is 12 percent.

The Obama administration is trying to change some of these policies, proposing to rewrite enforcement rules to require that child support orders be based on actual income and consider the “subsistence needs” of the noncustodial parent, to bar states from allowing child support debt to accrue while parents are incarcerated and to finance more job placement services for them.

“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,” said Vicki Turetsky, the commissioner of the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement. “Jail is appropriate for someone who is actively hiding assets, not appropriate for someone who couldn’t pay the order in the first place.”

Under a 2011 Supreme Court ruling, courts are not supposed to jail a defendant without a specific finding that he or she has the ability to pay. But that process does not always work as intended, especially when the client does not have a lawyer, advocates for the poor say.

In the Georgia class-action case, the plaintiffs were jailed in civil contempt-of-court proceedings in which they did not have lawyers. They included three veterans — one who had paid $75,000 in child support but fell behind when he lost his civilian job because of combat-related stress and family deaths; a second who was mentally ill and had a letter from a Veterans Affairs doctor saying he was unable to work; and a third who was incarcerated despite having paid $3,796 toward his debt by working odd jobs.

But the Georgia Supreme Court ruled against them, saying they did not have a categorical right to a lawyer.

Walter Scott

Walter Scott had four children, two in the early 1990s outside of marriage, and two in the late 1990s with a woman to whom he was married. The marriage crumbled when one of the children was still a toddler, and Lisa Scott, his estranged wife, began writing letters to family court asking for help.

“My husband bears no responsibility for his family,” she wrote in 2000.

In an article about a parenting program published in The Post and Courier of Charleston in 2003, Mr. Scott said that he had fallen behind when the checks he sent to a state agency for his ex-wife were mistakenly directed to the mother of his first children. (The South Carolina Department of Social Services, citing privacy laws, said it could not verify his account.)

Mr. Scott eventually spent two weeks in jail — a stint that cost him a $35,000-a-year job at a filmmaking company and sent him into isolation and alcohol abuse, he told The Post and Courier.

“I got mad at everybody in the whole world because I just lost the best job I ever had,” he said. “I just stopped doing everything.”

In 2002, Mr. Scott, further behind on his payments, agreed to participate in a parenting program called Father to Father and pay $350 a month. Mr. Scott reunited with his family, turned himself in for the unpaid child support and served another five months in jail.

Still, Charleston County Family Court records show that he remained in a cycle of unpaid child support debt, stints in jail and more threats of time behind bars. The records also show that when Mr. Scott was working in 2011, $125.76 was deducted from his check each week. He paid $11,411 that year, which included a lump-sum payment. But he was behind again in July 2012, and he paid $3,500, his last recorded payment, to avoid jail. The money came from his parents, Mr. Scott’s brother Rodney said.

Rodney Scott said his brother resented that his ex-wife was not required to work and that the pressure was always on him to pay support. Critics of the child support system say this imbalance is reflected in rules that say that if a mother receives public assistance, the father must pay it back, even if he is also poor. In many cases, though not in Mr. Scott’s, child support actions are brought by state officials seeking welfare reimbursement.

Lisa Scott could not be reached at addresses or phone numbers listed in her name. Samantha Scott, a daughter from Mr. Scott’s first relationship, said she had never heard her own mother complain about a lack of support. “If he had money, he would give it to us,” she said.

Ms. Turetsky, the head of the federal child support office, said the system should be based on the expectation that both parents would contribute toward their children’s needs. “It’s nuts,” she said of the policy of making destitute fathers repay welfare. “She gets the assistance; he gets charged with the bill.”

Jahmal Holmes, 28, is a current participant in the Father to Father program in North Charleston. He has two children, 4 and 8, and said he had agreed to court-ordered child support because he had been told that it was a requirement for their mother to receive Medicaid. The two have since broken up and share custody of the younger child, but he is still required to pay support for both.

Mr. Holmes said he did not realize that if he fell behind on payments, he would face jail. “I am behind now, and they are threatening to suspend my driver’s license — and I’m a truck driver,” he said. “When I saw that Walter Scott died, and he was in this program, that touched me emotionally. I see myself trying to get out of that situation.”

Rodney Scott said that he sometimes thought his brother did not do everything he could to catch up, but that Walter seemed to consider it a hopeless cause. He recalled seeing his brother plead to a judge that he just did not make enough money.

“He asked the judge, ‘How am I supposed to live?’ ” Mr. Scott said. “And the judge said something like, ‘That’s your problem. You figure it out.’ ”