top of page
Search
snitzoid

The Black Men’s Burden Harris Ignores

The burden of not being able to keep it in your pants or fire up some birth control.


I need to work on being more empathetic.


The Black Men’s Burden Harris Ignores

Ex-offenders find it hard to make good in the face of crushing child-support debts.

By Howard Husock

Oct. 29, 2024 5:18 pm ET


In an attempt to shore up support among black male voters, Kamala Harris proposed small-business loans and training programs aimed at steering them toward “high-paying jobs.” Whatever the virtues of her plans, they overlook a real-world situation facing millions of black men: the combination of a prison record and daunting child-support payments they had no way of paying during years behind bars.


One-third of black men are estimated to have at least one felony conviction. Whether one attributes this primarily to racism or dysfunctional culture, the practical question is how to help these men enter the legal workforce and lawfully support themselves, their children and the mothers of those children.


The most conventionally discussed barriers to successful “re-entry” are well-known, including occupational licensing laws and employer screening practices that disqualify ex-offenders from many jobs. But as the National Institute of Justice has reported, “one of the biggest obstacles to reentry is the size of a parent’s child support debt, which averages $20,000 to $36,000, depending on the state and the data used.” During work for the Manhattan Institute with the City of Newark’s Office of Reentry, I met a father of four without prospects of work and with child-support arrearages of more than $45,000. He made clear that returning to the heroin trade was an option.


After release, those with such imposing debts will, if they obtain legal employment, see their wages garnished to make good on payments. Those sums may be owed not to the mothers of their children but to state governments as reimbursement for welfare benefits. Failure to obey child-support court orders can itself lead to incarceration.


More than five million children have a parent who is or has been incarcerated, and at least 440,000 parents now behind bars have a child-support obligation. One wishes that norms would change such that out-of-wedlock births will become rare, but policy must confront reality.


The U.S. can’t afford to write off hundreds of thousands of men who could be productively employed but are pushed toward crime instead. It wouldn’t be a soft-on-crime policy for states to adjust or defer child-support arrearages until ex-offenders have adequate legal income to make payments. Better to require even modest symbolic payments as the newly released move toward legal employment and gradually increasing wages. Modifying a child-support order need not be considered the same as forgiving it, which state laws typically preclude.


Low marriage rates and high rates of illegitimacy are a ticket to long-term poverty for African-Americans. Seeking to extract child-support payments from ex-offenders who may have no history of legal employment or credit isn’t a practical step toward salvaging the life prospects of a large population, much less of fathers returning to their children’s lives and guiding those children toward better choices. Continuing to push these men into lives of crime certainly won’t help.


Mr. Husock is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

14 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Comments


Post: Blog2_Post
bottom of page