AT WHAT COST?
For Baltimore’s poorest families, the child support system exacts a heavy price — and it’s hurting whole communities
MARYLAND’S CHILD SUPPORT SYSTEM, intended to sustain children, is actually hurting some of the state’s neediest families — especially in Baltimore, an investigation by The Baltimore Sun has found. Under the dysfunctional system, parents in struggling city neighborhoods owe tens of millions of dollars in back child support — a whopping $33 million in one Northwest Baltimore ZIP code alone. This debt has accumulated under policies widely seen as short-sighted, if not nonsensical. It often is owed by men who cannot afford to pay what the government has decided is due.
In a city with high levels of poverty and crime, child support is yet another corrosive force in Baltimore, an undertow invisible to most. Advocates and researchers agree: The system’s policies are not only hurting fathers, but are tearing apart families and pulling down neighborhoods. And experts say the weight of that debt winds up encouraging men to join the underground economy.
“They [policies] are completely counterproductive to family stability, safety, economic self-sufficiency and communities — particularly poor communities,” says Joe Jones, founder of the Center for Urban Families in Baltimore.
The Sun’s nine-month investigation found:
■ Many of Baltimore’s most challenged neighborhoods are saddled with massive child support debt. It is concentrated in 10 city ZIP codes, where about 15,000 parents collectively owe more than $233 million, according to The Sun’s analysis of state child support data. Much of it is regarded as unrecoverable because the debt is very old and owed by people who cannot pay.
■ When noncustodial parents, mostly dads, are unemployed, they are routinely ordered to pay child support based on “imputed” income, a calculation of what they could earn if they had a job. These fictitious earnings do not reflect the barriers that may prevent someone from getting a job, such as a lack of skills or a criminal record. And such orders ignore research that shows parents are more likely to comply with their child support order if it is based on their actual ability to pay.
■ In many cases, not all of the money the fathers are paying is going to the family. That is because the men must repay the government for welfare. The aid is essentially a loan.
■ Even though the federal government requires states to use at least a portion of child support collections to pay back welfare, there is a way for Maryland to end the policy. A national expert estimates it would cost Maryland only about $1 million to stop the policy going forward — and direct parents’ entire child support payments to their families, instead of the government. That is a sliver of the $2.4 billion budget of the state’s Department of Human Services, which administers welfare and child support programs.
■ If a parent falls behind on just two payments, officials can yank his driver’s license. The agency’s relentless collection bureaucracy can also suspend professional licenses for some occupations, including barbers, nursing assistants and plumbers. That makes it hard for the parents to get and keep jobs, and in turn pay their support.
■ Parents who go to prison can run up thousands of dollars of child support debt while incarcerated. A state law passed eight years ago authorized the child support agency to freeze support orders while someone serves time, but advocates say that often does not happen. The amassed debt drives men back to an underground economy — whether working as a carpenter under the table, or selling drugs. That way, they can earn cash to deliver directly to their families, rather than having the system automatically take money from their paychecks.
The child support system was designed to make sure parents do not evade their responsibility to support their children. For most families, the system works. But people who earn less than about $40,000 a year can easily fall behind and get ensnared in its aggressive enforcement machinery, experts say.
For these low-income parents, the system is riddled with policies critics say are aimed more to punish fathers than help children. The Census Bureau estimates that even as the child support system lifted 800,000 people across the country out of poverty in 2018, it pushed an additional 300,000 into destitution.
To be sure, parents — both moms and dads — are expected to support their children. Some say they should not have had kids if they could not take care of them. Many fathers who run up big child support debt have made life choices that do not elicit sympathy.
Those left to raise the children, most often the mothers, say they are shouldering all the burden, and if they abandoned their children, they would be locked up.
In interviews with more than a dozen mothers, many say providing for a child is not about giving diapers one day and new sneakers the next. They say kids need consistent emotional and financial support.
“I have to put the system in the middle to make you do your job as a dad,” Nikkia Jefferson-El said outside a Baltimore courtroom, where a judge considered holding her daughter’s father in contempt for not paying his order.
But mothers also say they see the system sometimes makes things worse. Locking men up or taking away their licenses is short-sighted, according to these mothers. They want the system to help, not hurt, their ex'es chances of making money.
As tensions grow between parents, a child suffers when the dad does not come around as much, or when the mom wants the dad to stay away until he pays her the money he owes.
Yet when some fathers decide to straighten out their lives, they carry such a daunting level of debt — owed not just to their families, but also to the government — that they give up, advocates say. These advocates argue for policies aimed at supporting men who are trying, if belatedly, to do the right thing.
Take Cecil Burton. The 54-year-old West Baltimore man is deeply in arrears to the state child support agency from years when he was struggling with a heroin addiction. When he got clean in 1999, he began working more steadily and tried to tackle his debt.
Because he was not able to pay the full amount, the system rescinded his right to drive, seized his tax refunds and threatened to put him in prison.
He is still paying down some $60,000 in debt — money due largely not to his ex-partner and kids, but to the government for welfare the children and their mother received over the years.
For the men who are deeply underground, Burton said, the system and its long enforcement arm do not hold any sway. Only for those trying to do right.
“Child support messes with the fathers who are actually working and trying to man up and pay the child support,” Burton said, “the fathers who are out there working and struggling, trying to make ends meet.”
Critics liken the state’s approach to trying to get blood from a turnip.
“We have got to, as a society, think about what makes business sense. What is in the best interest of a child? What is in the best interest of a neighborhood, of a community?” says Jones, a national leader on child support reform.
While the government also collects child support from noncustodial mothers, the vast majority of cases involve fathers. In Baltimore, nearly all are African American, many of them poor and living in challenged Baltimore neighborhoods.
The issue has drawn the attention of Maryland officials, including those in races for mayor and City Council, as well as members of the General Assembly.
State Del. Nick Mosby, a Baltimore Democrat who is running for City Council president, says the child support system “perpetuates a cycle of poverty and it perpetuates a cycle of criminal activity.”
Some contend these policies are mostly designed to punish a stereotype — the deadbeat dad — when in fact the problem is the system has not been able to distinguish between those who are avoiding payment and those who simply cannot pay what is due.
Across the country, states are wrestling with the same issues. Some, like Minnesota, Colorado, California and even Maryland have tried pilot projects and legislative fixes. But most of these have been marginal changes. In Maryland and elsewhere, the problems have been allowed to fester for decades.
Last year, legislators including state Del. Kathleen Dumais, a Montgomery County Democrat, pushed in the Maryland General Assembly for a package of bills. She and others are concerned the system is creating more problems for deeply poor families. They proposed limiting the use of fictitious, or imputed income, for instance, and making orders more realistic for low-income parents.
None of the bills passed. Supporters attribute that to their complexity and the resistance among some lawmakers, who considered the problems the fault of so-called “deadbeat dads.” More legislation has been introduced this year.
In interviews, Department of Human Services officials defended their work, saying the system is successful at delivering parental financial support to tens of thousands of families across the state. But they acknowledged there are problems for poor families that need to be addressed.
“The goal is to establish the orders based on the ability to pay,” says Kevin Guistwite, who runs the department’s Child Support Administration.
Despite their public role and their significant power in setting orders and imposing sanctions, Baltimore’s Circuit Court judges declined multiple requests made in person, over the phone and by email to answer questions for this article. The judiciary’s spokeswoman, Terri Charles, did not give any explanation as for why the judges declined to be interviewed. After asking for the questions in writing, they later decided not to answer them.
Meanwhile, across the city, community leaders see the consequences. In West Baltimore, at the families center, Jones tries to help dads who are afraid of being arrested because of unpaid support and worried about losing their jobs because of unreliable transportation. And they are also upset about being estranged from their children because they cannot meet the demands of a system they see as stacked against them. Jones says in some cases, parents decide to deal drugs to pay their child support and other bills.
In East Baltimore, at the Men and Families Center, director Leon Purnell says men come to him, hopeless, with pay stubs that show after two weeks of work, they only have $2 left. Child support frequently ruins their credit, which can make it hard for them to get housing. When they have a place to live, he says, they can be evicted if their paychecks come up short from wage garnishments. Their desperation feeds addictions.
Purnell has seen fathers do much more for their children than the child support system gives them credit for. They take their kids to school. They love and encourage them. They cook them meals and buy them necessities. He has known men to show up in court with a cigar box of receipts as proof for the support they have given their children, only to have judges disregard the evidence.
“The problem with child support is, it is really not about the child,” Purnell says. “It is about money.”
What just happened?
Here they are not mother and father. In a small courtroom on the east side of North Calvert Street, officials refer to them as “custodial parent” and “noncustodial parent.” And after a proceeding that may last just seven or eight minutes, a judge will decide how much one must pay the other, usually the man to the woman.
The child support order is often unrealistic. Also capricious. Parents are left wondering, What just happened?