The Child Support System Doesn’t Support Children — It Criminalizes Black Fathers

There are, at this writing, approximately $113 billion in unpaid child support obligations in the United States. That number is so large that it has ceased to function as information and has become instead a kind of background noise — a figure cited in policy papers and legislative hearings that no one seriously expects to collect, because the people who owe it largely do not have it. The Office of Child Support Enforcement, the federal agency that oversees the system, has acknowledged for years that the majority of child support debt is owed by men who are poor, who are unemployed, who are incarcerated, or who earn so little that their obligations exceed their income. This is not a collection problem. It is a design problem. The American child support system was built in the 1970s to recoup welfare costs from absent fathers, and it has never been fundamentally redesigned since. It operates today as a machine that converts poverty into debt, debt into warrants, warrants into incarceration, and incarceration into the permanent destruction of a man’s ability to support his children. And the children it was designed to support remain, in the main, hungry.

Let us be precise about how this machine works, because its mechanics are both cruel and instructive, and understanding them is the prerequisite for any serious conversation about reform. When a child is born to unmarried parents and the mother applies for public assistance — Medicaid, TANF, food stamps — she is typically required, as a condition of receiving benefits, to cooperate with the state in establishing paternity and obtaining a child support order against the father. This is not optional. The state demands it. And the reason the state demands it is not, as the public generally assumes, to ensure that the child receives financial support from the father. The reason is Title IV-D of the Social Security Act, which created the child support enforcement system in 1975 and which provides the federal government with a mechanism to recoup the cost of public assistance from noncustodial parents.

The State Takes the Money

Here is the fact that most Americans do not know, the fact that transforms the child support system from a flawed but well-intentioned program into something far more troubling: in many states, when a custodial parent receives TANF benefits, child support payments made by the noncustodial parent are kept by the state to reimburse itself for the welfare expenditure. The child receives nothing. A father who is paying child support to support his child is, in practice, paying the state to recoup welfare costs, and the child for whom the payment is ostensibly intended sees none of it.

The federal government allows states to “pass through” a portion of child support collections to families on TANF, but the amount varies by state and is often minimal. Some states pass through as little as $50 per month. Others pass through nothing. The father believes he is supporting his child. The mother believes she should be receiving support. And the state is collecting money from one poor person to offset the cost of providing subsistence benefits to another poor person, while claiming to operate a system designed for the welfare of children.

This is not a conspiracy theory. It is the documented administrative structure of the program, acknowledged by the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement itself. The states have a direct financial incentive to establish and enforce child support orders because the federal government provides matching funds for every dollar collected. The more the state collects, the more federal money it receives. The interests of the state are therefore aligned not with the interests of children, but with the interests of revenue collection, and the system’s design reflects this alignment with brutal clarity.

How Arrears Become Unpayable

The accumulation of child support arrears is not, in most cases, the result of deadbeat fathers refusing to pay. It is the result of a system that sets obligations based on imputed income rather than actual income, that continues to accumulate debt during periods of incarceration and unemployment, and that imposes penalties for non-payment that destroy the capacity to pay.

Consider the typical trajectory. A man loses his job. His child support obligation, which was set based on his previous income, continues to accrue at the same rate. He applies for a modification, but the modification process takes months, and during those months, the full obligation continues to accumulate. By the time his case is heard, he may owe thousands in arrears. Interest accrues on the arrears in many states. His driver’s license is suspended, which in most of America means he cannot get to work, which means he cannot earn the money to pay, which means the arrears continue to grow. Eventually, he is found in contempt of court for failure to pay, and he is incarcerated. While incarcerated, his obligation continues to accrue. When he is released, he now has an incarceration record that makes employment more difficult, a suspended license that makes transportation impossible, and an arrears balance that is mathematically unpayable.

This is not a hypothetical. This is the documented experience of hundreds of thousands of American men, disproportionately Black men, who have been ground through a system that punishes poverty with incarceration and incarceration with unemployability and unemployability with more poverty. The Urban Institute estimated that approximately 70 percent of child support arrears are owed by parents who earn less than $10,000 per year. These are not men who are hiding assets. These are men who have nothing, and the system’s response to their having nothing is to take more.

The Modern Debtors’ Prison

The United States Supreme Court, in Turner v. Rogers (2011), held that an indigent person cannot be incarcerated for failure to pay child support without a hearing to determine ability to pay. In practice, this ruling has been widely ignored. Family courts across the country continue to incarcerate men for child support non-payment without adequate inquiry into their financial circumstances. A 2015 investigation by National Public Radio and subsequent reporting found case after case of men jailed for inability to pay — men who were homeless, men who were disabled, men who earned minimum wage — in proceedings that lasted minutes and made no serious effort to determine whether the non-payment was willful.

Walter Scott was killed in 2015 by a police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina. He was pulled over for a broken taillight. He ran because he had an outstanding warrant for unpaid child support. He owed approximately $18,000 in arrears. He was shot in the back five times. The child support system did not kill Walter Scott. A police officer killed Walter Scott. But the warrant that made him run, the fear that made a broken taillight a potential prison sentence, the system that converted an unpayable debt into a reason to flee — these are the conditions that the child support system created, and they are the conditions under which Black men across the country live every day.

Pushed Underground

The most perverse outcome of the current system is that it pushes fathers away from their children rather than toward them. A man who knows that any employment income will be garnished at rates of 50 to 65 percent has a powerful incentive to work in the underground economy, where his earnings are invisible to the enforcement system. A man who knows that contact with any government system — tax filing, license renewal, even hospital admission — may trigger enforcement actions has an incentive to avoid all government systems. A man who knows that appearing in family court will result in a contempt finding and possible incarceration has an incentive never to appear. The system, designed to bring fathers into their children’s lives through financial contribution, achieves the opposite: it drives fathers underground, off the books, out of the reach of both the enforcement system and the children it was supposed to serve.

The fathers who go underground do not disappear from their children’s lives. Many of them continue to provide support informally — cash, groceries, diapers, clothing — that does not flow through the formal system and therefore does not reduce their arrears balance. The CDC data on father involvement, which shows that Black fathers who are present are the most involved fathers in the country, includes many men who are technically in arrears, technically deadbeats by the system’s accounting, and who are in fact feeding, clothing, and caring for their children in ways that the system is structurally incapable of recognizing.

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”
— Anatole France

France’s observation about the law’s formal equality masking substantive inequality applies to the child support system with devastating precision. The system treats a man earning $200,000 who refuses to pay and a man earning $12,000 who cannot pay with the same enforcement tools: wage garnishment, license suspension, contempt, incarceration. The tools are designed for the first man. They are applied to the second. And the result is a system that effectively punishes the second man for being poor while barely inconveniencing the first.

What Reform Looks Like

Colorado has implemented a child support model that other states should study. The state’s system uses a more realistic income-shares formula, provides automatic adjustments when income changes, and has invested in employment programs for non-custodial parents who are struggling to find work. The result has been higher collection rates with less incarceration — a demonstration that treating fathers as potential contributors rather than presumptive criminals produces better outcomes for everyone, including children.

Australia’s child support system offers an even more dramatic contrast. The Australian system adjusts obligations automatically based on tax returns, caps obligations as a percentage of income to ensure that the paying parent retains enough to live on, and emphasizes mediation over litigation. The system is not perfect, but its design philosophy — that child support should be proportional to actual income and that the goal is to support children rather than punish parents — is fundamentally different from the American approach, and its outcomes are demonstrably better.

A System That Could Actually Support Children

The reforms needed are not radical. They have been articulated by researchers, endorsed by child welfare organizations, and implemented in scattered jurisdictions for years. They require only the political will to prioritize children’s welfare over state revenue collection.

First, child support obligations must be based on actual income, not imputed income. Setting an obligation based on what a man could earn rather than what he does earn guarantees arrears accumulation for any father who experiences unemployment, underemployment, or incarceration. Second, obligations must be automatically adjusted when circumstances change — when a parent loses a job, goes to prison, or becomes disabled. The current modification process, which requires the parent to petition the court and wait months for a hearing, is a bureaucratic barrier that serves the system’s administrative convenience rather than the family’s needs.

Third, arrears accumulated during incarceration must be forgiven or substantially reduced. A man who is in prison cannot earn money. Accumulating child support debt during his imprisonment serves no purpose other than to ensure that upon release, he faces a debt so large that legitimate employment cannot service it, which drives him underground, which reduces the support his children actually receive. Fourth, states must be required to pass through 100 percent of child support collections to the custodial family, regardless of TANF status. If the purpose of the system is to support children, then the money must go to children. If the purpose is to reimburse the state, then the system should be honestly named and its costs weighed against its effects.

And fifth, the system must invest in the employment capacity of non-custodial parents. Job training, credential programs, employment placement services, and barrier removal — addressing license suspensions, criminal record expungement, and transportation assistance — must be integrated into the child support system rather than siloed in separate agencies. A father who can earn is a father who can pay. A father who has been rendered unemployable by the system’s own enforcement mechanisms is a father who cannot pay, and no amount of contempt findings will change that arithmetic.

The $113 billion in arrears is not a number that represents deadbeat fathers. It is a number that represents a broken system — a system that was designed to serve the state’s fiscal interests, that criminalizes poverty, that drives fathers away from their children, and that fails to deliver the support it promises to the children in whose name it operates. The children deserve better. The fathers deserve better. And the country that claims to value both fatherhood and childhood has a system that systematically destroys both. Reform is not a matter of compassion for non-custodial parents, though compassion is warranted. It is a matter of effectiveness. The current system does not work. It has never worked. And the $113 billion in uncollectable debt is the proof, written in numbers too large to ignore, that it is time to build something that does.