In Illinois, if the child support that has been ordered by a judge after a divorce is not paid within 60 days and/or there is a delinquency of $500, the name of the non-paying parent is supposed to be automatically sent by computer to the Bureau of Child Support Enforcement. The non-payer is then flagged for a wage attachment that automatically takes the child-support payments from his paycheck. A mother need not be on public aid for this service to be given to her.
”The next problem is finding him,” says Jeanne Baxter, who heads the ACES Du Page County chapter. ”If they find him (95 percent of the time it`s the ex-husband), he often moves to another job to avoid having the money deducted. Then they have to locate him again. Or he`ll become self-employed so they can`t know what he makes. Or he`ll hit the road and move out of state. Or if the judge does order that he be picked up, he doesn`t go to jail.”
Both Cook and Du Page Counties, for example, have overcrowded jails with little or no room for fathers who`ve failed to pay child support. In Cook County, they are usually put on electronic monitoring or work-release programs.
”But once threatened with jail by a judge,” says David Schaffer of the Cook County state`s attorney`s office,” it is amazing how many men who claimed they were indigent suddenly come up with some money for a payment. The threat of incarceration always has an immediate effect on fathers who have not paid.”
In the Chicago area, however, that threat is apparently seldom issued or carried out. On one day last January, with a jail population of 8,400, none of the inmates in Cook County Jail was there for non-support, even though an average of 60 orders a month are issued to pick up non-paying fathers. On the same day at the Du Page County Jail, there were only two child-support delinquents out of an inmate population of 300.
”You got to make a judge awful mad to go to jail for child support,”
says one county sheriff`s employee. ”Judges don`t seem to get mad over that.”
”I can`t even keep robbers in jail,” says Cook County State`s Atty. Jack O`Malley, who agrees that the threat of incarceration would be an effective deterrent. But in counties such as Cook where the jail is overcrowded, the threat is not realistic.
”There are laws on the books,” says Baxter of ACES. ”The biggest problem is enforcement. You have to get the agencies to move more quickly and the judges to act. When they don`t, the men soon find out they don`t have to show up in court and that they don`t have to pay. What`s going to happen to them? Nothing.”
But things are beginning to change and quickly.
Mothers with children left high, dry and broke by delinquent fathers are uniting with the nationwide ACES organization to push for better and more effective legislation. The subject is starting to get more attention from the media. Illinois` Department of Public Aid recently launched an awareness campaign by displaying ”Pay Your Child Support” posters on 250 toll booths around the state. A once-little-known bureau, the Office of Child Support Enforcement in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, now issues yearly lists of the 10 Most Wanted Deadbeat Fathers. Last November Greg Morey, who owed an estimated $100,000 and was at the top of the list, was forced by the unfavorable publicity to turn himself in and was sentenced by an Arizona judge to 1 1/2 years in prison for criminal non-support.
Entrepreneurs are now entering the scene. Dennis Bannon of Laurel, Md., who owns a collection agency, recently expanded his operations to include Children Support Services Inc., which seeks to collect delinquent court-ordered child-support payments.
”We`ve solved every case we`ve gotten so far,” says Bannon, who since starting the service last September now has more than 100 clients, some of whom come from as far away as Iceland. ”We are motivated a little bit more than a government bureaucracy because if we don`t get money for the mother, we don`t get money for ourselves either. We just take the tactics we`d use in regular collections and apply them to child support, except we charge the mothers a smaller and negotiable fee-up to 25 cents per dollar collected-than we would a business firm, which could be up to 50 percent.” He also charges a $25 application fee, which he says he often waives.
”Oh, we find the men,” Bannon says. ”We`ve called them at their work, at their favorite bar, even while they are shopping. We educate them on the phone and tell them that if they don`t pay, we will contact the authorities because we know everything about them. We tell them they can go to jail for not paying. They often respond by telling us what we can do to ourselves and hang up. Then they call back later, apologize and agree to pay. The thought of being stuck in a cell with a big guy named Bubba makes them come around.”
Bannon says that so far he has found that 25 percent of the delinquent men had not paid because of financial reasons-they were broke, unemployed, disabled or even homeless. For the other 75 percent, he said, it was bitterness over the divorce and their bad feelings toward their ex-wives that led them to ignore the needs of their children. Bannon adds that at least 10 other collection agencies across the country have gotten into the child-support area.
Child-support insurance is now being offered by Complete Equity Markets of Wheeling, a Lloyd`s of London insurance brokerage firm that specializes in unusual coverage.
”It`s brand-new this year, and we are the first we know to do it,” says company spokeswoman Cindy Straka. The insurance can be taken out by either the paying or non-paying parent, but if it is the non-paying parent, usually the mother, the paying parent must sign the papers also. The coverage will provide the court-ordered child support (up to $2,500 a month) if the supporting parent involuntarily is unable to make payments because of job termination or illness and disability. That type of insurance is so new, Straka says, that they are unable to say how much it will be in demand.
”Any man who does not support his children is a child abuser,” says U.S. Rep. Henry Hyde of Illinois` 6th District. ”We use the phrase the `me generation.` I don`t know of any other area where the `me generation` is so pervasive as when a father walks away from his children. These men begrudge anything connected with their failed marriage, and they take it out on their children. I`ve seen these children and met with their mothers. You`d have to be a stone not to be moved by their plight.”
Hyde is sponsoring House Bill 1241, which would make it a federal crime for a non-custodial parent to flee across state lines to evade child-support payments. The penalty for such an act, on the first offense, would be a fine of up to $5,000 and/or six months in prison. For the second offense, the penalty would be a fine of up to $250,000 and two years in prison. It also would put the FBI on the case of the delinquent fathers, 25 percent of whom move out of state after a divorce.
Hyde`s bill has been tabled twice before, but he says, ”This is the year, I think, it is going to pass and become law.” Eighty-nine congressmen have joined as co-sponsors because, Hyde says, of increased interest in a problem that has become more acute and the voices of women, such as those in the ACES group, that have become more vocal.
”If no one paid taxes, how could government function?” Hyde says. ”If these men do not pay child support, how do families function? I think making non-payment a federal crime will be quite therapeutic once a few of these dads end up in the federal pen. We have to make being responsible respectable again.”
Another aspect of the problem is reflected in a U.S. Census study that indicates that the father who has visitation rights is more likely to pay child support. Eighty percent of the fathers with visitation rights pay some or all of the assigned support, compared to 49 percent of paying fathers who have no visitation rights.
Jeffrey Leving, a Chicago divorce attorney who has produced ”Fathers and Divorce,” a video self-help guide for divorced men, believes that ”there is definitely a connection between visitation rights and child-support payments.” Whereas women think that child support is not enforced
aggressively enough, he believes that visitation rights for fathers are hardly enforced at all.
”How many times will a woman be jailed for visitation abuse? Never,”
he says. ”I am 100 percent sure that if visitation rights were enforced, the child-support problem would diminish.”
”Our state and county agencies and the courts are going to have to do a better job enforcing all the dictates of a divorce,” says one divorce lawyer, ”or our family unit is going to be in deep trouble. It already is getting there.”
Cook County State`s Atty. O`Malley points out that the greatest part of the child-support problem is social in nature because parents by the hundreds of thousands across America feel no obligation to their children after they get divorced from their spouses. Then the ball falls right into the court of our government agencies.
”This is where we see most clearly all the problems we are facing collectively as a society,” says Sam Stratman, one of Hyde`s assistants, who has studied the problems of non-payment of child support. ”We are dumping on the state the personal problems of the family, and it ends up with the inevitable-namely, sometimes-less-than-pe rfect justice. It is a tragedy that the state has to step through the minefields of personal relationships. And in the end, we are talking about human beings with gut-wrenching traumas who have been lost in the shuffle.”
”The whole point of child support is the children,” Caliendo says.
”It`s for them. It`s theirs. That should not be forgotten. And when you have a father who wants to pretend his children don`t exist, does not send them money, does not come to see them, it does terrible damage, financially and psychologically. The tragedy goes beyond money.
”The other day my 11-year-old daughter and I went to the supermarket, and her father-my ex-husband-was there. She was just ahead of me when I saw him down the aisle, and she walked right by him. He lives in Schiller Park, and we live in Melrose Park, only two suburbs away. But he hasn`t seen her in years.
”A little later, they were standing right next to each other at the frozen-juice section: father and daughter but total strangers. It`s not just that he hadn`t paid the money to raise her, he didn`t even know her.”
