Child Support Enforcement, Poverty, and the Creation of the New Debtor’s Prison

United States federal and state child support enforcement policies were intended to extract funds from absent parents to redistribute to children and to reimburse government expenditures on welfare. As the systems have developed, increasingly punitive mechanisms such as wage garnishment, attribution of income, prohibitions on freedom of movement, including passport denial, and ultimately incarceration are possible outcomes of failure to pay child support. These systems operate very differently for middle- and upper-middle-class families than for poor families. The structural inequalities disproportionately harm racial and ethnic minority families, particularly low-income families. A recent court ruling restricting access to counsel for civil actions means that noncustodial parents may be subject to contemporary debtors’ prisons, compounding the effects of the expanding carceral state as the social safety net vanishes. This article traces the development of the child support enforcement systems through legislative, administrative, and judicial decisions, and, alongside empirical studies, examines how public policies purportedly enacted for the benefit of children living in economically fragile families have harmful consequences.