Parents that fail to pay child support are subject to jail time in most states, which of course means they can’t work and continue to rack up child support payments that they can’t pay, an ingenious system that doesn’t help anyone.
New state statutes in Wisconsin will allow sheriffs to shackle nonpaying parents with electronic monitoring devices, which theoretically will allow them to continue working, or find work in order to pay their child support. Opponents of the changes say that the state will lose the incentive of forcing jail time to make parents pay, which according to family court commissioners, 25% of them do within a week of going to jail. Of course the commissioners don’t say where they get the money to pay, and fail to realize that the majority, a whopping 75% are still not able to pay even when threatened and jailed. They must love the food.
Maybe the commissioners would have a better chance of collecting support payments if they reviewed WHY parents are unable to make payments, they might be surprised to find job loss and unrealistic support orders at the heart of the matter.
I do give the writer kudos for including “dead beat moms” in the write up, typically in these reports we only hear about dads when statistics show that more moms that are ordered to pay child support default than dads.
