Assistance is on the way to incarcerated parents, due to an executive order by President Obama.
With roughly a month to go before he leaves office, Obama this week unveiled a new federal rule that will allow incarcerated parents the chance to reduce their child-support payments while they are behind bars.
“By ensuring states set their orders based on actual circumstances in the family, we believe the rule will result in more reliable child support payments, and children will benefit,” Assistant Secretary for Children and Families Mark Greenberg said in a statement about the new rule, published by the Department of Health and Human Services.
Now, all states will be required to notify parents incarcerated for more than six months that they have the right to seek changes to child-support payments.
Many states consider incarceration “voluntary unemployment,” therefore blocking prisoners from being able to change their child-support payments. Now, states will not be allowed to treat incarceration as such.
Obama had advocated for the rules in late 2014, part of his push for criminal justice reform in his second term. In June 2015, Republicans in Congress — led by then-House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin — introduced legislation to block the Obama administration from introducing the rule, saying it would be a burden on taxpayers and reward “deadbeat parents.” The legislation has since stalled.
According to the HHS’s Office of Child Support Enforcement, parents owe an average of $23,000 or more in child support. With it being hard enough to reintegrate into society, the cycle of poverty and incarceration likely continues. In 2010, the Obama administration said nearly 29,000 of the 51,000 federal prisoners with child-support orders were behind on payments.
Vicky Turetsky, commissioner of the Office of Child Support Enforcement, the new rule is “grounded” in evidence and “sound state practice.”
“Our number one goal is to increase regular child support payments to families. Orders often go unpaid when they are set beyond the ability of unemployed and low-wage parents to pay them, resulting in large arrearages that themselves lead to less employment and support paid,” Turetsky said.
