According to the Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that focuses on the U.S. criminal justice system, about half of the 2.2 million people currently incarcerated in the United States are parents. One in five of them have child support obligations, and they are disproportionately poor black men.
Being in prison doesn’t negate their child support obligations even though they can’t pay it while they are behind bars. Most of the custodial parents, usually the mothers, end up turning to the states for welfare to try and make ends meet. Once the prisoner is released, he owes the accrued amount. Some of that money, and in some cases all of it, is owed to the state, depending on how much taxpayer money was used to support their child or children.
The Marshall Project thinks this is all super-bad because these criminals leave prison in debt, and Obama thinks so, too. Obama thinks it’s such an awful thing that he’s authorized new regulations which reclassify incarceration as “involuntary.” This will mean that the non-custodial parent can ask that his child support responsibilities be placed on hold until the sentence is over. The regulations are set to be published early next year and implemented by states by 2017. Click here to read some sad stories about men who have it so hard because they have to be responsible and stuff.
My personal favorite is this guy, Mason, who passed up a promotion at work because it’s not fair that he suffer the consequences for his action. Because history or something.
“I want to grow in the company. But I don’t want to work that much harder if they’re just going to take all of it to pay for history,” Mason said.
Curious. Does that mean we are all off the hook for reparations? I mean, it’s history right?
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So what do these new regulations accomplish? Well, I guess Obama sees this as part of his common sense criminal justice reforms.
Who do these new regulations help? Not the mothers nor the children. The children are still without a father. The mothers are still without financial support, and they still end up on welfare. And it certainly doesn’t help the taxpayers who end up bearing the burden of supporting these children. Classifying these criminals’ incarcerations as involuntary means they aren’t on the hook for paying back the state that was financing their child support while they were suffering the consequences of their illegal actions.
Minority women and children. Just more bumps in the road to Obama, who is on a mission to make life easier for people who make the personal choice to break the law.
