The Report > Review of the Re-Entry Process > Transition > Victims, Families, and Communities

D: Managing the Key Transition Period

Policy Statement 23: Victims, Families, and Communities

Prepare family members, victims, and relevant community members for the offender's return to the community, and provide them with protection, counseling, services and support, as needed and appropriate.

Recommendation E: Create policies for child-support debt management and collection that encourage payment and family stability, and engage family members in creating a viable support strategy.

As a person with a child-support order prepares to return to his or her home community, he or she will again have to face responsibility for regular child support payments. A parent may face years of child support arrears if he or she was unable to suspend or reduce payments during the period of incarceration. (See Policy Statement 8, Development of Intake Procedure, for strategies on suspending or reducing child support payments during or soon after intake.) Even if the parent had a temporary reprieve during incarceration, re-entry will require him or her to resume payments, perhaps in addition to several other, offense-related debt burdens. [1]   There is evidence that child-support pressures may help drive some less-educated, low-skilled parents into the underground economy in order to increase their income or to avoid formal enforcement. Overwhelming debt may also create an additional barrier to family reunification and parent-child contact. [2]  

Child support policies that are responsive to parents with a recent history of incarceration and unemployment or low-wage jobs can increase the prospects that such individuals will maintain steady employment, regular support payments, and contact with their children. Child support policies should emphasize the importance of regular support payments whenever possible, even when those payments are small. [3]   State policies that link nonpayment of child support to possible incarceration (such as revocation of parole and criminal contempt policies) should be carefully assessed for their impact on child-support compliance, participation in illegal income-producing activities, and recidivism. [4]   On the other hand, there are many steps that policymakers can take to positive impact child support compliance. Research from Wisconsin, for example, found that when child support is "passed through," or paid directly to families instead of being kept by the state to reimburse welfare costs, fathers paid more support and were less likely to work underground. [5]   Potential state strategies to manage arrears include compromise or forgiveness of state-owed arrears, debt leveraging (reducing arrears in exchange for good behavior), and suspension of enforcement. In addition, a few states waive arrears when couples marry or when families re-unite. [6]   Setting realistic orders based on a parent's actual ability to pay and helping parents manage arrears can help also parents to establish a pattern of compliance. [7]  

Corrections and community corrections administrators should collaborate with child support agencies to create policies that promote positive child support outcomes as well as successful reintegration of individuals released from prison or jail. For example, in Texas, the Attorney General's office is engaged in a pilot program with the state jail system in Houston and El Paso, in which the attorney general will offer to hold an individual's back child-support payments in abeyance for three years, predicated on his participation in fathering classes while incarcerated and in Project RIO (an employment program coordinated by the Department of Corrections and the state's Workforce Investment Boards) upon release.

Example: John Inmann Work and Family Center, Colorado Department of Corrections

The Work and Family Center (a multiservice re-entry program) collaborated with the Denver child support program under a federal grant to review child support orders and arrears balances and develop more appropriate payment arrangements. In a 2001 evaluation, researchers found that parents served by the Center pay a higher percentage of their child support, and returned to prison in lower numbers, than others released from state prison. [8]  

Although federal child-support matching funds may not be used to pay for criminal justice functions or employment and training activities, states are permitted to use these funds for child-support case identification, tracking, referral, development of "work or pay" plans, and coordination with employment programs when a noncustodial parent has been court-ordered to participate in work activities. [9]   In addition, state child-support agencies may use their federal performance incentive payments and federal parental access and visitation grants to fund child-support case management services for incarcerated and re-entering parents. [10]  

Transition planners and supervision officers should also seek to engage directly with parents released from prison or jail and their families to develop strategies for those individuals to pay regular support to their families and to manage their debt. Transition planners can help minimize divisiveness if they engage family members in this discussion early in the re-entry planning process so that the terms of the agreement are known to family members prior to the return of the incarcerated parent. Child support agencies could consult with families (or family services teams) to develop a case plan that would address the needs of the child, yet recognize the financial limitations of the returning parent. The case plan could be developed directly by the child-support agency or could be incorporated into the plan developed through the family services team.

The child support plan could include a referral to employment and training and other appropriate services, initiate an expedited review and adjustment of the existing support order, address the resumption of monthly payments, include a negotiated agreement to compromise or waive arrears, and set the terms of arrears repayment. [11]   The plan might also include a co-parenting agreement and specify other ways (i.e., non-financial) that the individual and his or her family can support the child during the transition period until support payments can resume. Unless domestic violence is a factor, mediated solutions should be sought as a first alternative.

  1. Most child support is collected through payroll withholding. Under the Consumer Credit Protection Act, 15 USC. 1673(b), 50 - 65 percent of a parent's disposable earnings may be deducted from an obligor's paycheck for child support. Other enforcement remedies include interception of unemployment compensation, veteran's, and Social Security benefits and tax refunds, suspension of driver's and occupational licenses, automatic seizure of bank accounts, and credit bureau reporting. No citation found for FN_boom-times-a-bust-declining-employment-among-less-educated-men! .

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  2. Shortly after the birth of a child, 30 percent of unmarried fathers reported informal earnings, mostly in combination with regular earnings. No citation found for FN_regular-and-irregular-earnings-of-unwed-fathers-implications-for-child-support-practices! ; see No citation found for FN_what-explains-the-continuing-decline-in-labor-force-attachment-among-young-black-men-forthcoming-paper-cited-in-elise-richer-et-al-dot-boom-times-a-bust-declining-employment-among-less-educated-men! ; No citation found for FN_w-2-child-support-demonstration-evaluation-report-on-nonexperimental-analyses-fathers-of-children-in-w-2-families-vol-ii! ; Fred Doolittle, Virginia Knox, Cynthia Miller, Sharon Rowser, Building Opportunities, Enforcing Obligations: Implementation and Interim Impacts of Parents' Fair Share (Manpower Demonstration Research Corp., 1998-09-01), 34 .

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  3. Vicki Turetsky, Realistic Child Support Policies for Low Income Fathers (Washington, DC: Center for Law and Social Policy), 1 .

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  4. In some states, payment of child support is a condition of parole. No citation found for FN_serving-parents-who-leave-prison! . Other states require "purge" payments (lump-sum payments of child support) to avoid incarceration. Fred Doolittle, Virginia Knox, Cynthia Miller, Sharon Rowser, Building Opportunities, Enforcing Obligations: Implementation and Interim Impacts of Parents' Fair Share (Manpower Demonstration Research Corp., 1998-09-01), 134 . In 1997, 27 percent of parents in state prisons reported income from illegal sources in the month before incarceration. Christopher J. Mumola, Incarcerated Parents and Their Children (U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2000-08-30), NCJ 182335 .

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  5. No citation found for FN_w-2-child-support-demonstration-evaluation-report-on-nonexperimental-analyses-fathers-of-children-in-w-2-families-vol-ii! . TANF reauthorization legislation pending in Congress, H.R. 4, would allow states to pass through all or more support to current and former TANF families.

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  6. Some practitioners are concerned that the Bradley Amendment to the Social Security Act, 42 USC. 666(a)(9), bars compromise of arrears. The Bradley Amendment requires states to treat support obligations as judgments under state law as they become due each month. As with other judgments, child support obligations may not be modified retroactively but may be satisfied or compromised by agreement of the parties. The US Department of Health and Human Services has issued a series of policy statements on the Bradley Amendment, including OCSE PIQ-99-03 (March 1999). See Office of Inspector General, OEI-05-99-00390, 19; Jo Peters, Washington Collectibility of Arrearages, Washington State Department of Social and Health Services, Division of Child Support (2002), ES 8 - 10, 121 - 134; No citation found for FN_an-ounce-of-prevention! .

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  7. Vicki Turetsky, Realistic Child Support Policies for Low Income Fathers (Washington, DC: Center for Law and Social Policy), 1 - 2 .

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  8. During the Center's first two years of operation, the Center was jointly administered, funded, and staffed by the Colorado Department of Corrections, the state and local child support agency, and the state AFL-CIO No citation found for FN_serving-parents-who-leave-prison! ; No citation found for FN_building-debt-while-doing-time-child-support-and-incarceration! .

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  9. OCSE AT-00-08 (September 15, 2000). Under child-support "work or pay" rules, states may order parents of children receiving welfare who owe overdue support to (1) make payments under a negotiated repayment plan or (2) participate in certain employment and training activities. 42 USC. 666(a)(15).

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  10. 42 USC. 658a(f); OCSE AT-01-04 (February 2, 2001) (federal incentive payments); 42 USC. 669b (federal access and visitation grants). In addition, authorization for new fatherhood funding is included in H.R. 4, TANF reauthorization legislation pending in Congress.

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  11. When support has been assigned to the state to repay welfare costs, the state has the authority under federal law to compromise child support owed to the state, subject to state law. Most, but not all, states allow custodial parents to waive the child's share of arrears.

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