How the Failures of Welfare Reform Created Our Lawless Courts (Part Four)

By Terri Lynn Tersak , Teri Stoddard and Dave Heleniak

There is a plethora of examples where the victims of our lawless courts acknowledge the subhuman status of non-custodial parents (NCP). They use various terms to describe those who are denied their civil and/or human rights and their state of being (the conditions a person is subjected to play a major role in determining their state of being). Based on the criteria of the treatment of the American NCP, which term is the proper one to use? We need to evaluate what is being done to them in order to determine which term applies best.

What should a NCP expect in return for their tax dollars and child support payments?

Based on documented cases, they may have reason to fear being denied all visitation with their children, being brutally tortured for disagreeing with the wishes of the court (“Part Three” of this series exposed the physical torture those who disagree with false claims of domestic are sometimes subjected to), and being killed if they try to escape the torture, all of which being done to them solely to take money from them, even if they don’t have any to be taken.

Moreover, the victims of the enforcement of welfare reform too often choose suicide over returning to our torturous jails and prisons. In at least one case, when the victim’s attempt at suicide failed, law enforcement finished the job by shooting him in the back.

Additionally, the United States Congress has made our jails and prisons exempt from HIPPA regulations, making it next to impossible for the victims of torture in our jails and prisons to get their own medical records. This includes cases where the families of torture victims have tried to find out what happened to their loved one when they have died as an apparent result of the torture (as witnessed by other torture victims) and were cremated without an autopsy being conducted.

These observations reveal that today “fatherhood” means that you are nothing more than a paycheck. You are a disposable being, and all while the federal government pays your state with your tax dollars to do this to you.

What do we call this state of existence for the NCP? Many have used highly charged terms like slavery and indentured servitude. Objective evaluation of the state of the NCP does show that although their existence clearly reduces them to a subhuman state, neither of those terms properly or fully apply.

Their imprisonment is cyclic, so they are not actually slaves. They are not under the employment of our government or the custodial parent during their NCP existence, so they aren’t in a state of bondage or direct servitude. We can also discount other terms, such as serfdom, bonded labor, debt bondage, truck systems, and statare as being incorrect to describe the state of existence of the NCP. However, among the terms that describe a subhuman state, one comes close to applying. That term is peonage . Creating and/or subjecting someone to a state of peonage is a violation of the Antipeonage Act of 1867 .

There is a unique twist to our system that keeps it from applying to any of the traditional subhuman descriptions. In most of the systems described by the prior terms, it is either the state or a private debt that the peon is indentured to. In the case of child support state created by our welfare reform, the peon is beholden to both the state and a private debt. They are then taxed to pay for their abuse, torture, and/or murder at the hands of the state.

Despite popular fiction, child support is a private debt between the parents. Note that the orders usually have a plaintiff who sues for support from the defendant. It is not a criminal charge. It is a civil suit. As covered in “Part One” of the series, the process and procedures of the suit are predetermined, developed outside of any oversight by the legislators or electorate of the country.

Another point of great debate is whether or not the imprisonment of NCP who fall behind in their child support payments constitutes a “ debtors prison .”

The United States eliminated the practice of imprisonment for debts at the federal level in 1833. Most of the several states followed suit. However, to this day it is still possible to be incarcerated for private debts enforced by the states for debts of fraud, child-support, alimony, and release fines.

Unlike acts of fraud and release fines for crimes, in cases of child support and alimony there is arguably no actual criminal act committed. Attorneys and court officials often state that these cases of imprisonment are for contempt of court, not the debt, notwithstanding the point of fact that the contempt charge is exclusively the direct result of the default on a private debt, not a criminal act.

On any given day there are more people in our jails and prisons for private debts then there were citizens in the United Kingdom when our Declaration of Independence was penned. Given all of the above, we do in fact run debtor’s prisons as part of welfare reform’s enforcement.

Several states, most notably South Carolina, utilize these prisoners as labor for grounds and maintenance of corrections and other state facilities. The pay averages $0.18 per hour. Along with being a huge savings in labor costs to the states, various federal programs provide funding for having these debtors and alleged perpetrators of domestic violence in their correctional facilities.

The purpose of these incarcerations of debtors is purported to be to aid in recovering child support arrearages. It doesn’t take a mathematics major to figure out that keeping someone out of the job market while paying them less than ten percent of the minimum wage will fail to do that job.

Often these debtors fall even further behind in their child support during their imprisonment, only to be released with as little as 90 days to pay their arrearages in full or return to prison. Many of these prisoners who were interviewed show that they have been stuck this brutal cycle for as long as seven years.

As reported in True Equality Network’s report on CSPIA Abuses by the States , a great deal of accrued arrearages are the direct results of the state courts unwillingness to reduce child support obligations to NCP’s who have become unemployed, under-employed, disabled, imprisoned for arrearages, or called into reserve duty. The failure or refusal to process requests for downward modifications both violates federal law (see 42 USC 666 (a)(10)(A)(i) ) and creates uncollectible arrearages that should adversely affect the state’s enforcement performance but for reasons yet to be determined have not.

Following federal law with respect to downward modifications will improve compliance and reduce enforcement costs. The benefit of downward modifications in reducing the accumulation of arrearages should also be helpful to states under the current incentive formula. However, the states seem to have other mechanisms in place to compensate for these uncollected arrearages.

From a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services funded Study : ” Most modification are upward. Most (90%) of the orders were modified upward, only 10 percent of the orders were modified downward. ”

According to data on NCP fathers from government funded studies, only 4% of NCP fathers who applied for a downward modification of their child support order after their earnings fell by more than 15% from one year to the next received a downward adjustment.

The five state study “ Revising Old Child Support Orders: ,” conducted by the Institute for Research on Poverty , shows the levels of downward adjustments awarded vary greatly among the states.

From page 15:

” An examination of the revised orders reveals that 3 percent were revised downward, and another 6 percent had no change in the dollar amount of the basic order, but had some other change, for example a temporary increase in the order to collect an arrearage that had accumulated or the addition of health insurance. The remainder of the revisions (91 percent) were increases .”

From page 16:

” Policies regarding downward revisions varied across states, and this clearly affected the average percentage increase in orders. Downward modifications accounted for 17 percent of the modifications in Oregon, 13 percent in Delaware, 7 percent in Colorado, 1 percent in Illinois, 0 percent in Florida, and 3 percent in Wisconsin. ”

The typical response we hear from the judiciary follows the form of Honorable Anne Kass, currently a District Judge in the Second Judicial District State of New Mexico. In her tenure as the Presiding Family Judge, Albuquerque, New Mexico, District Court, she states in “Can Everyone Pay Child Support?,” 18(12) Fair$hare, December 1998, at 16:

“ The time has come for someone to speak in defense of ‘dead-beat dads.’ Divorced or separated parents who do not pay support have been taking a beating from everyone, including the President.

I have seen some parents who refuse to pay child support even though they have plenty of money to do so. . . . However, I have seen far more parents who are ordered to pay child support who pay some support but not all they are ordered to pay. Many of these parents are engaged in a financial struggle that they cannot win. These are the working poor. ”

Our current system of enforcement destroys the NCP’s ability to meet their obligation and then punishes them for the results of what the system has imposed upon them. And the states can profit from their suffering.

What should we say of the state of the United States Congress? A system without redress is tyranny; those who support it are tyrants. We’ll let the members of Congress stand on their records.

Terri Lynn Tersak is the President and CEO of True Equality Network .

Teri Stoddard writes on issues affecting today’s families and serves as True Equality Network’s Senior Equal Parenting Analyst.

David Heleniak is a civil litigation attorney in New Jersey and Senior Legal Analyst for the True Equality Network.