Skip Child Support. Go to Jail. Lose Job. Repeat-gctid150869

[Ajamu]

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/skip-child-support-go-to-jail-lose-job-repeat/ar-AAbkZsj

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

             The New York Times
                             By FRANCES ROBLES and SHAILA DEWAN          4/20/2015

NORTH CHARLESTON, S.C. — 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.

     Walter L. Scott once participated in the program.   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 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 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 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.' "