Should Fathers Be Incarcerated for Child Support?

If the father has no choice, how is her DECISION to keep and raise that baby anyone else's decision? You keep evading this. Impregnation is NOT "having a baby." Those are distinctively different phenomena. That is why you can abort an fertilized seed, but not a child. That scientific, biological separation.

I might consent to SEX, but that does not mean I consent to having a CHILD. If you can't understand that difference, you probably should just leave the conversation.

I know of at least two men who have been locked up for 1 or 2 weeks in order to remind them they owe it to their kids to support them. I dont support putting them in jail for longer periods of time because they cant earn money while in jail.

and men have very little control over it,

To remind them they have an obligation to support their children. Some need more reminding than others.

9 Unfortunately,
national data do not exist with respect to how often the incarceration option is used. CSE agencies
generally do not track arrests for nonpayment of child support and the record-keeping of sheriffs’
offices or prosecuting attorneys’ offices on this topic is sporadic, nonexistent, and/or inconsistent
across jurisdictions.20

Child Support Enforcement: Incarceration
As the Last Resort Penalty For Nonpayment
of Support
Carmen Solomon-Fears
Specialist in Social Policy
Alison M. Smith
Legislative Attorney
Carla Berry
Information Research Specialist
March 6, 2012

By the time PRWORA became law in 1996, it was known that there were a
significant number of parents owing child support who themselves were living at
or below the poverty line. For example, a report indicated that California’s arrears
were highly concentrated among noncustodial parents with low incomes and high
arrears.66 Further, a report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics noted that in 1997
most fathers in state prisons reported incomes below the poverty line prior to
incarceration, with 53% earning less than $1,000 in the month before their
arrest.67 Nevertheless, obligors continued to be treated as one homogeneous
group, and their failure to pay seen as automatically willful. President Clinton
assured an audience (a week prior to signing the welfare reform bill) that
nonpayment of child support was a serious crime, comparing it to robbing a bank or a 7-Eleven store.68 To press his point, the President warned: “if you owe child support, you better pay it. If you deliberately refuse to pay it, you can find your face posted in the Post Office. We’ll track you down with computers . . . . We’ll track you down with law enforcement. We’ll find you through the Internet.”69 As was typical of the discourse surrounding debtor parents, the President made no distinction, as a matter of fact or policy, between deadbeats and deadbrokes. He certainly made no mention of people in prisons and the structural barriers to compliance, or how such enforcement of delinquent child support might impact prisoners or their families.70 The goal was to make child support obligations inescapable, “like death or taxes.”71

As indicated, this Amendment sets forth three distinct provisions: that once
entered as final, any payment or installment of support due under a child support
order is an enforceable money judgment by operation of law; that such a
judgment is entitled to full faith and credit within and across state boundaries;
and in its most cited provision, that the judgment cannot be retroactively
modified by any state, except for pending petitions, but only prospectively.
In arguing for his proposed amendment, former New Jersey Senator Bill
Bradley stated, “[t]his bill recognizes that circumstances change. The noncustodial
parent may lose his or her job and not be able to afford the original child
support award. This bill is not intended to prevent changes in future child support
orders if circumstances change for the parents . . . .”112
The practical effect of this Amendment is that it prohibits courts or agencies
from reducing or eliminating a support order once it is issued, for any reason. The Bradley Amendment does allow for retroactive modification in some circumstances:
when the money is owed to a non-TANF custodial parent and that parent
agrees to waive arrears, and in some limited circumstances, when the arrears are
owed to the state to repay welfare costs and the state engages in a program
designed to reduce arrears.113
The Bradley Amendment mirrors other legislation that seeks to capture the
mass of parents owing child support with a wide net, due to the poor collection
efforts common to states during the period in which it was enacted. Prior to the
Amendment, it was a common practice for noncustodial parents owing support to
amass arrears, only to have the amount owed reduced or eliminated by invoking
unlimited judicial discretion in another state to obtain the reduction. Congress
intended this amendment to eliminate this practice.114 The Bradley Amendment
allows downward modification of child support orders prospectively, but only
from the filing date of an application to modify.
Nevertheless, the Bradley Amendment didn’t contemplate relief for incarcerated
parents with child support orders, or any other child support defendant who
was unaware of an existing child support order. Nor does it offer retrospective
relief to a parent, who has for any reason, failed to affirmatively petition for a
modification before arrears accrue.115 The Bradley Amendment has met with
opposition from many quarters due to its inflexible application.116 Most notably proponents of repeal or revision cite egregious scenarios involving child support
debt incurred by noncustodial parents.117 One such situation concerned a
noncustodial father who was held hostage in Kuwait for almost five months,
unable to comply with the Amendment’s notification procedures.118 A second
case involved a man who was falsely incarcerated for murder, exonerated and
released, only to be arrested for non-payment of child support.119
One need not consider such extreme instances of unintended consequences to
understand the generally negative effect of the Bradley Amendment on a great
number of incarcerated parents. Many prisoners discover long after imprisonment
that a federal law has foreclosed any possibility of a reduction after
accruing significant debt. Further, prisoners are subject to state law, which often
forbids them from petitioning a court for even a prospective suspension of arrears
simply because they are incarcerated.

As a last resort, after all attempts to collect have failed, Pater’s office will pass off a case to the prosecutor. A non-custodial parent who misses payments for 26 weeks out of a consecutive 104 weeks can be charged with felony nonsupport. Pater said people ask him what good it does to lock up someone, since they can’t pay support from prison.
“We are aggressive where we need to be,” he said. “There are people who have the ability to pay, they just don’t want to be responsible. Eventually, they have to be held accountable. We have worked that case absolutely every which way we can, and that is the absolute last resort.”

Maybe jail time is seen as a deterrent to others.

Judge Hazelwood, Lieberman, and others were state and local officials, but
national figures also spouted ideological pronouncements casting underclass
fathers as disreputable agents of poverty. These figures included Republican
Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush as well as
Democratic President William Clinton. The latter promised to “end welfare as
we know it,” and he did in fact replace the Aid to Families with Dependent 124
Children (AFDC) entitlement with the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families
(TANF) program. When President Clinton signed the Personal Responsibility
and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA) into law in 1996, he
explicitly linked welfare reform and child support together. “For a lot of 125
women and children,” Clinton said, “the only reason they’re on welfare
today—the only reason—is that the father up and walked away when he could
have made a contribution to the welfare of the children.”126
The magnitude and range of federal child support legislation enacted since
the mid-1980s are striking, especially because family law has traditionally been
a state concern rather than a federal matter. In 1984, Congress enacted a new
127
round of amendments to Title IV-D of the Social Security Act. Designed to get 128
delinquents to pay up, the amendments directed states to enhance efforts to
collect child support by making available employer withholding, liens against
property, and deductions from tax refunds.
129
In 1992, the federal government took even bolder steps to address the
problem of unpaid child support. Political leaders on both sides of the
aisle—Republican Congressman Henry Hyde and Democratic Congressman
Charles Schumer, for example—spearheaded the effort to enact the Child
Support Recovery Act (CSRA). The only opponents of the act were members 130
of the nascent fathers’ rights movement. Some of them questioned the 131
assumption that child support delinquency caused poverty and argued that most
of the impoverished families headed by unmarried mothers would not be lifted
out of poverty even if the delinquent fathers somehow paid their child support.132
Having found a convenient whipping boy in the “deadbeat dad,” Congress
ignored the argument.

roger wrote:

Maybe jail time is seen as a deterrent to others.

That is meaningless, as the perception might just as easily be fantasy as fact. Do you have any science?

Is incarceration a deterrent?

So this brokers the question, even IF we WERE to make those dad's pay their child support, what? Where is the money? You're telling me that these guys who either don't make anything, or have a median income of $3,000, they are going to be able to make a difference in the woman's financial affairs? Get real. It's not going to make the difference between those kids starving and them having dinner. It most certainly won't take them off public welfare.