Prisons of Debt

The Afterlives of Incarcerated Fathers

Prof. Lynne Haney

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780520969681
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Matrimonio y sociología familiar

A profound portrait of the hidden injustices that trap fathers in a cycle of punishment and debt. In the first study of its kind, sociologist Lynne Haney travels into state institutions across the country to document the experiences of the millions of fathers cycling through the criminal justice and child support systems. Prisons of Debt shows how these systems work together to create complex entanglements—rather than "piling up" in men's lives, these entanglements form feedback loops of disadvantage. The prison–child support pipeline flows in both directions, deepening parents' debt and criminal justice involvement. Through moving accounts of men struggling to be fathers from behind prison walls and under the weight of support debt, Prisons of Debt exposes how the criminalization of child support undermines the most essential of familial relationships. Haney argues that these state systems can end up producing exactly the kind of parent they fear and loathe: bitter, unreliable, and cyclical fathers. Based on observations of 1, 200 child support cases and interviews with 145 indebted fathers in New York, California, and Florida, Prisons of Debt reveals the actual practices of child support adjudication and enforcement alongside the lived realities of fathers trapped in those systems. The result is a rigorously documented analysis of how poor men are too often denied their rights of citizenship and of fatherhood.

PART I

Accumulation

“Sir, can you hear me?” Judge Chen yells into the speakerphone. “Why couldn’t you come to court today? Why are you appearing by phone?” The man on the other end of the line explains that his driver’s license had been suspended due to back child support so he could not drive to court. “What about public transportation, Mr. Garcia? We have that in Los Angeles, you know?” Judge Chen responds, unpersuaded. “Yes, but I just had heart surgery,” the man explains. “So I can’t move very well. It takes me three buses to get down there.” The state attorney sitting across from Judge Chen confirms that her records indicate Mr. Garcia has been on disability assistance for several years. “Well, then, I guess I understand. I suppose this is why you haven’t worked in years?” Judge Chen responds, her question sounding more like an accusation than a query. Mr. Garcia corroborates that he has indeed been disabled for the past few years.

The state attorney then reads the details of Mr. Garcia’s case for the entire courtroom to hear: Mr. Garcia owes over $500,000 in arrears on orders for his children, who are now twenty-eight, thirty-three, and forty-one years old. Gasps ripple across the courtroom, including from Judge Chen, who rarely shows any reaction to the cases before her. She does a quick calculation and announces that, given the 10 percent interest that California charges on child support debt, Mr. Garcia’s interest-only payment on his debt would approximate $2,300 per month. “Damn, that’s like having a mortgage on an expensive house,” the man sitting next to me whispers. “But I bet he don’t live in no expensive house.” Silence then falls over the courtroom as everyone contemplates what it means for a man living on a disability pension to be charged that amount by the state. The silence is broken by Mr. Garcia who, almost on cue, reveals his place of residence: “I rent a small studio in the back of the auto body shop I used to work at. . . . It’s loud and dirty but it’s a place to live.”

Finally, the state attorney gets to the actual point of the hearing: Mr. Garcia would like his license back, but because of his spotty payment history, the state is not inclined to reinstate it and might actually consider holding him in contempt of court for nonpayment. A lively discussion ensues, with Judge Chen and the state attorney going back and forth about what Mr. Garcia has paid on the debt and how much he receives in disability every month. During it all, Mr. Garcia remains silent. Finally, they conclude by offering him a “deal”: if he pays $500 every month on his debt, which is half his disability benefit, they will lift the hold on his driver’s license and not hold him in contempt. Mr. Garcia tries to get them down to $300, explaining that he cannot work to increase his income, but they won’t budge. “Well, I can try,” he concludes, “if it means I get my license back after all these years.”

As the phone call ends, Judge Chen looks dismayed. She then asks the attorney if anything can be done about Mr. Garcia’s arrears. “A $2,300 interest payment seems, well, a bit excessive,” she notes. The attorney shakes her head, explaining that she’ll look into the case but the arrears are a mixture of welfare debt and parental debt. “They’re from the 1980s and 1990s so our hands are tied.”

Indeed, it appears little can be done to reduce Mr. Garcia’s debt: once accumulated, his support debt seems set in stone. Child support is one of very few types of debt that cannot be discharged, so it follows those who cannot pay it to their grave. Even filing for bankruptcy does not absolve a parent of this debt. This is perhaps why Mr. Garcia seems resigned to a life in debt. At no point in the proceedings did he try to get his debt reduced, modified, or altered; all of the negotiations were over how large his monthly payment on it would be. While it was unclear from the hearing whether his debt continues to accrue interest after all these years, it has profound consequences nonetheless. Living $500,000 in the red to the state meant living without a driver’s license, without a professional license, without the ability to get a federal loan or private credit, and often without a bank account. It meant living without the possibility of owning his place of residence; Mr. Garcia’s mortgage was to the State of California. In essence, it meant living without financial citizenship and all the rights and responsibilities that come with it.

Although few indebted fathers have amassed as much debt as Mr. Garcia, nothing else was particularly unique about his case. Like millions of other men, his life included many bouts of unemployment, a few stints in jail, ongoing health problems, and lots of years of poverty. The one exceptional thing about Mr. Garcia’s case was its longevity: it began in the late 1970s, when his first son was a toddler, and lasted into his sixties, when his grandson could have himself been a father. In fact, over the years, his support debt had become something of a family affair, with Mr. Garcia’s oldest son sometimes making payments on a decades-old debt once intended to support him as a child. He did so simply to keep his elderly father out of legal trouble.

The longevity of the Garcia case is precisely what makes it such a good preview of what is to come in part 1. It offers a window onto the successive waves of child support reform that have emerged over the past forty years: from the rise of child support as a federal issue, to its use as a replacement for public assistance, to its recasting as a repayment of state benefits. Add to this the many machinations of state-level policies. Mr. Garcia has ridden these waves from the beginning and lived through a storm of policy change—and has half a million dollars of debt to show for it. The next two chapters tell the story of how this storm formed: chapter 1 reveals how the storm has flooded the lives of poor families in general, while chapter 2 details how the storm has become a tsunami for formerly incarcerated parents.

1

Making Men Pay

One of the main reasons single mothers go on welfare is that fathers have failed to meet their responsibilities to the children. . . . If every parent paid the child support they should, we could move 800,000 women and children off welfare immediately.

Bill Clinton, at the 1996 Announcement of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act

There are very few policy areas, particularly when it comes to families and children, that are characterized by complete bipartisan agreement. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, child support policy was one such area: politicians and legislators broadly agreed that the “problems” of sole parenthood, poverty, and welfare could be addressed by “making men pay.”¹ While their emphases differed in terms of whom men should pay and what they should pay for, policy-makers agreed that the support system needed revamping. After decades of leaving child support to state legislatures and agencies, the federal government entered this arena, setting out to build a policy apparatus alongside the state systems. That policy apparatus remains largely intact today as few lawmakers have had the political will to criticize or reform it.

In particular, federal involvement in child support was intricately linked to welfare politics from the start. But, as I show in this chapter, the nature of the link shifted over time. Initially, child support was framed as a replacement for public assistance—as a form of support that would help poor families avoid public assistance. Federal policies used mandates and oversight to ensure compliance with support orders between parents. Over time, the federal focus shifted and child support became a form of repayment for public assistance—a way to pay back the state for benefits it provided to poor families. Often with the encouragement of academic researchers invested in ending welfare as they knew it, child support politics were interwoven with welfare reform politics. This resulted in a system in which more parents became indebted to the state itself. Filing a child support order became a requirement for applicants for public aid, who then had to give up their right to support payments. This shift to child support as “state payback” is largely what has underpinned the massive increase in child support debt since the 1970s.

The federal government’s role in child support became considerable, but individual states retained significant control over implementation and enforcement. Some key policies of the national child support system amounted to mandates—that is, they dictated what states had to include in their support programs. But many other directives were merely advisory. States used this maneuvering room to leave their mark on the form and focus of child support systems. Clear patterns of divergence then arose, with some states taking a law and order approach designed to “make men pay” in the punitive sense. Other states set out to moderate the effects of national policies by designing state systems that would “make men pay” in strictly the financial sense. These state patterns also varied and evolved over time, with states engaging in punitive child support politics at different moments.

The policy divergences within and across states are described in the second part of this chapter, where my analysis shifts to those state policies that have had the strongest impact on debt accumulation. These include divergent policies on how child support orders are set—in particular, on how they define a parent’s “ability to pay” and how orders are calculated for low-income parents whose families are on public assistance. Equally pronounced are variations in state procedures for modifying a support order once it’s on the books. Given the differences in how states define a “significant change of circumstance” that warrants the modification of an order, parents confront inconsistent legal standards as they manage support payments and the debt that can arise from them. There are also huge variations in the interest rate applied to support debt, which ranges from 0 to 12 percent, depending on where the order was filed. All of these differences make the experience of child support, and its accumulated debt, dependent on the parents’ state of residence.

Amidst all these differences, one outcome is consistent: federal and state child support policies have worked together to create a system in which poverty, and not necessarily neglect or desertion, leads to massive child support debt. Whether this was the intention or not, these policies have been woven together into a net that captures dead-broke parents, who are subsequently cast as deadbeats. Child support debt is unique in that a small number of parents owe the majority of it: close to 60 percent of support debt is owed by only 10 percent of obligors. And they are not the privileged few; indeed, the overwhelming majority of these obligors are poor—one study found that 70 percent of them reported little or no income in the previous year.² These are also the parents with the most debt: 76 percent of parents who owe more than $100,000 in back support made less than $10,000 per year.³ The child support system thus generates a perfect storm of debt, with arrears accumulating rapidly and from multiple directions until they submerge low-income parents. So, how did that storm emerge? How did the child support system become the terrain of the poor?

A PERFECT STORM OF DEBT

The story of how the federal child support system was built is a complex one, largely because the policies that comprise it are themselves very complicated. Since the mid-1970s, there have been dozens of pieces of federal legislation dealing with child support specifically, as well as countless others that affect the system indirectly. There has also been a vast amount of research on the form and focus of these policies.⁴ Amidst all this legislation and policy analysis, two developments at the federal level stand out as especially consequential: policies enacted to regulate the payment of private support and to mandate the repayment of public a...