The line between the guilty and the innocent becomes unclear because officials track not only parents with arrearages, but also those whose payments are current and those who are not under any order at all. (At one point, former attorney general Janet Reno referred to even noncustodial parents who do pay as "deadbeats" [DOJ 1994].) One agent expressed the presumption of guilt, boasting to the Washington Post, "We don't give them an opportunity to become deadbeats" (O'Harrow 1999, A1). The NCSL points to the presumptions not only that all parents under child-support orders are already quasi-criminals, but also that all citizens are potential criminals against whom preemptive enforcement measures must be initiated now in anticipation of their future criminality. "Some people have argued that the state should only collect the names of child support obligors, not the general population," they suggest. But "this argument ignores the primary reason" for collecting the names: "At one point or another, many people will either be obligated to pay or eligible to receive child support" (Top 5 Questions).

Between the incentive payments, the patronage, and the bureaucratic conflicts of interest, aggressive collection methods now seem to be the norm rather than the exception. Perhaps most disturbing is the case of Brian Armstrong of Milford, New Hampshire, who some claim received a summary "death sentence" for losing his job. Armstrong was jailed without trial in January 2000 for missing a hearing about which his family claims he was never notified. One week later he was dead, apparently from a beating by correctional officials.[2]

Fatal beatings of fathers are probably not widespread in North American jails, but other fatalities exemplify a more common form of "death penalty" routinely meted out to fathers who are neither charged with nor tried for any crime. In March 2000, Darrin White of Prince George, British Columbia, was denied all contact with his three children, evicted from his home, and ordered to pay more than twice his income as well as court costs in a divorce for which he gave neither grounds nor agreement. White hanged himself from a tree.[3]

In contrast to Armstrong's fate, White's seems to be common. "There is nothing unusual about this judgment," said former British Columbia Supreme Court judge Lloyd McKenzie, who pointed out that the judge in White's case applied standardized child-support guidelines (Lee 2000). The suicide rate of divorced fathers has skyrocketed, according to Augustine Kposowa of the University of California. Kposowa (2000) attributes his finding directly to judgments from family courts.

Throughout the United States and abroad, child-support machinery has been beset with allegations of mismanagement and corruption (Baskerville 2003). In Colorado, "the results of a new audit showed that the state's child support enforcement system is in disarray" (Franke-Folstad 1999), according to those involved in the process. It's not like it's gone from good news to bad news. It's just worse news, says Richard Hoffman of the organization Child Support Enforcement (qtd. in Franke- Folstad 1999). According the Weekly Wire, ennessee, like many states around the country, has recently begun pursuing deadbeat parents with a new level of determined vengeance. Yet the state collection agency's own Child Support Fact Sheet indicates that Tennessee actually "collected less in child support per dollar of state expenditure in fiscal year 1997 than it has in any of the preceding four years during which this indicator has steadily trended negatively" (Granju 1998; see also Loggins 2001). The Aurora Beacon News in Illinois reported on October 16, 1999, that-a new state child support processing system . . . has delayed payments to thousands of parents," and mothers are refusing to let children see their fathers "under the belief that the parents responsible for child support haven't made their payments (Olsen 1999).

In Britain, the London Times editorialized in 1999 that the nation's Child Support Agency had become "a monstrous bureaucracy, chasing responsible parents and wrecking the families it was meant to support." As elsewhere, the directors promise a "thorough overhaul," yet with uncertain logic place the blame not on the government but on the "responsible parents" whose families it is wrecking: "In future, absent fathers will have to prove they are not the father of a child," reported the Times, apparently oblivious to the contradiction (Father Figures 1999). In Australia, a 2000 parliamentary inquiry into the Child Support Agency (CSA) found "systemic corruption by public servants." Robert Kelso of Central Queensland University reports "evidence the CSA is . . . creating false debt by exaggerating incomes of fathers." Commission chairman Roger Price said no one should have any illusions that the CSA was set up to benefit children: "It is not about the best interests of children and never has been" (Kelso and Price qtd. in Stapleton 2000, 26).

Current enforcement practice overturns centuries of common law precedent that a father could not be forced to pay for the stealing of his own children. "The duty of a father (now spouse) to support his children is based largely upon his right to their custody and control," runs one court ruling typical of the age-old legal consensus. "A father has the right at Common Law to maintain his children in his own home, and he cannot be compelled against his will to do so elsewhere, unless he has refused or failed to provide for them where he lives" (Butler v. Commonwealth, 132.Va.609, 110 S.E. 868 [1922]). As recently as 1965, the Oregon Supreme Court held that "a husband whose wife left him without cause was not required to support his children living with her" and that "parents generally may decide, free from government supervision, at what level and by what means they will support their children" (qtd. in Harris, Waldrop, and Waldrop 1990, 711, 689).

Today, these precedents are ignored, so much so that a father becomes a "deadbeat" if he fails or refuses to surrender control of his children to the government hegemony. "Child support is "paid" only when it's paid in a bureaucratically acceptable form," writes Bruce Walker of the District Attorney's Council in Oklahoma City, who claims to have jailed hundreds of fathers. "Men who provide nonmonetary support are deadbeat dads according to the child-support system," says Walker. "Even men who are raising in their homes the very children for whom child support is sought are deadbeat dads. If the mother gives the father the children because she cannot control them or has other problems, then he is still liable for child support" (1996, 18).

Fathers who lose their jobs are seldom able to hire lawyers to have their childsupport payment lowered, and judges rarely lower it anyway. Yet government lawyers will prosecute a father free of charge, regardless of his or the mothers" income. It is also now a federal crime for a father who is behind in child support, for whatever reason, to leave his state, even if doing so is his only way to find work. This law has even been used to prosecute a father whose former wife moved to another state with his children (Parke and Brott, 64-65).

Why so many divorced fathers seem to be unemployed or penurious may be accounted for by the strains that legal proceedings place on their emotions and work schedules. Many fathers are summoned to court so often that they lose their jobs, whereupon they can be jailed for being unemployed. Many divorced fathers are either ordered out of their homes or must move out for financial reasons, so they are immediately homeless. They may also lose their cars, which may be their only transportation to their jobs and children. Those who fall behind in child support, regardless of the reason, have their cars booted and their driver's licenses and professional licenses revoked, which in turn prevents them from getting and keeping employment. An odd myopia is demonstrated in a controversy over whether to give child support priority over other debts during bankruptcy, when no one seems willing to ask the obvious question of why large numbers of allegedly well-heeled deadbeats are going through bankruptcy in the first place (U.S. House of Representatives 1998). A Rutgers and University of Texas study found that "many of the absent fathers who[m] state leaders want to track down and force to pay child support are so destitute that their lives focus on finding the next job, next meal or next night's shelter" (Edin, Lein, and Nelson 1998). In what some have termed a policy of "starvation," a proposed federal regulation will render these impecunious playboys ineligible for food stamps (Federal Register, 64 FR 70919, December 17, 1999).

Though ostensibly limited by guidelines, a judge may order virtually any amount in child support. If a judge decides that a father could be earning more than he does, the judge can "impute" potential income to the father and assess child support and legal fees based on that imputed income. The result is that child-support payments can exceed what the father actually earns. If a father at any point works extra hours (perhaps to pay attorneys' fees) or receives other temporary income, he is then locked into that income and those hours and into the child-support level based on them. If a relative or benefactor pays the child support on his behalf, that payment is considered a "gift" and does not offset the obligation that the father still owes. If the payment is made to the father, it becomes "income," which is then used to increase his monthly obligation.

It is hardly surprising that some fathers who have been through this ordeal eventually do disappear. Anyone who has been plundered, vilified, and incarcerated-all on the claim of supporting children who have been taken away from him through no fault of his own-will eventually reach the limits of his endurance. Some may be tempted to conclude that this outcome is precisely what the enforcement system is designed to encourage, for certainly it does no harm to the enforcers" business.

Promoting Marriage or Divorce?

The relentless (il)logic of the child-support system extends up to the level of federal policy, to the point where the tail seems to wag the dog. Although new federal programs claim to "promote fatherhood" and "enhance relationships," no explanation is forthcoming from HHS of how precisely the government can achieve these objectives. What requires no explanation is that the government can arrest and incarcerate people, which seems to be what it is doing to those whose marriages it is unable to save.

In May 2003, HHS announced grants to "faith-based groups." In Idaho, Healthy Families Nampa (whose name seems tailored to the federal program) will use $544,400 for "counseling and other supportive services to parents who are interested in marrying each other," Assistant Secretary Wade Horn told the Associated Press. Horn said the grants are "targeted at preventing divorce among those who are married and at improving parenting skills of both married and non-married couples" (qtd. in Meckler 2003). HHS documents make clear, however, that in fact the grants are for collecting child support. Michigan's enforcement agency will receive almost a million dollars above its regular federal subsidies. Horn claimed the aim is to "enhance the overall goals and effectiveness of the child support enforcement program by integrating the promotion of healthy marriage into existing child support services" (HHS 2003). He did not explain how law enforcement agents can enhance anyone's marriage.

Evidence suggests that these agents are having precisely the opposite effect. Bryce Christensen of the Howard Center for Family, Religion, and Society points to "evidence of the linkage between aggressive child-support policies and the erosion of wedlock" because child-support enforcement subsidizes divorce. The latest moves by HHS seem to validate Christensen's conclusion. "Politicians who have framed such [child-support] policies . . . have however unintentionally-actually reduced the likelihood that a growing number of children will enjoy the tremendous economic, social, and psychological benefits which the realization of that ideal [of a two-parent family] can bring" (2001, 67, 63).

Here we have the ingredients of a government perpetual-growth machine, one that extends well beyond family policy. Identifying fathers rather than governments as the culprits behind family dissolution not only justifies harsh law enforcement measures, but also rationalizes policies that contribute further to the absence of fathers, which they ostensibly are meant to prevent. Further-given the undeniable correlation that the fatherhood advocates have established between fatherlessness and today's larger social pathologies, such as poverty, crime, and substance abuse-it allows officials to ignore the simplest and safest solution to these ills, which is to stop eliminating fathers. Instead, governments devise elaborate schemes, invariably extending their reach and power, to deal with the problems that their removal of the fathers has created: not only fatherhood promotion and marriage therapy, but larger antipoverty programs beloved of the left and law enforcement measures dear to the right. By concocting a fatherhood crisis where none previously existed, government across the spectrum has neutered the principal rival to its power and created an unlimited supply of problems for itself to solve.

Footnotes

1. Standard legal authorities insist this distinction no longer exists. "With the procedural merger of law and equity in the federal and most state courts, equity courts have been abolished" (Black's Law Dictionary, 6th ed., s.v. "Equity, courts of"). back

2. West 2000, and accompanying accounts by and interviews with Armstrong's family. The U.S. Attorney's office in Concord, New Hampshire, has refused to discuss the case. back

3. Account compiled from interviews with White's daughter and with Todd Eckert of the Parent and Child Advocacy Coalition, who was assisting White before his death, and from reports by Donna Laframboise in the National Post, March 23, 25, and 27, 2000, in the Vancouver Sun, March 24, 2000, and in the Ottawa Citizen, March 24 and 27, 2000. Attacks on White in the Toronto Sun (April 9, 2000) and in other newspapers did not contest the essential facts. back

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Stephen Baskerville is a professor a political science at Howard University.