Despite being locked up before for ignoring orders to pay child support, Luna had managed to come up with only $13.11 for his two children during the past year. He mumbled that he couldn’t give more, that he didn’t have a job and that he lived with his parents.
In Bexar County, parents like Luna who miss child support payments are far more likely to get jail time than in Texas’ four other largest urban counties.
Last fiscal year, 1,013 parents were held in Bexar County Jail for failing to pay child support, according to figures from the Texas attorney general’s office.
That’s more than five times the number of deadbeat parents jailed in Dallas, Harris, Tarrant or Travis counties. Those four counties combined sent 631 people to jail last fiscal year for owing child support.
So far this year, deadbeat parents have taken up an average of 161 beds per week at the jail — the same number that Harris County jailed all last year.
The vast discrepancy reflects a tougher-than-average philosophy in Bexar County in which parents who owe child support more often are summoned to court, judicial officials said. Usually, they’ll stay in jail for a few days or weeks to teach them a lesson or until they come up with some money.
“In two days, your namesake is going to turn 10. That’s a pretty big day for him,” Rausch barked at Luna, ordering him back to jail until he could make a $2,000 lump-sum payment. “A week later is Father’s Day, and you’re going to be in jail for both of those. I don’t think it matters to you.”
After Luna’s hearing, Rausch said fathers who don’t have relationships with their children often need to be threatened with jail to get their attention.
“The intact family is disappearing,” he said. “There are good fathers out there, but the numbers are going in the wrong direction.
“This court has taken a very firm, tough approach to fathers and mothers who don’t pay child support. I feel very comfortable and confident we’re handling it the right way.”
Not everyone, however, agrees.
“It’s counterproductive to me, and it just doesn’t make a lot of sense,” County Judge Nelson Wolff said.
It costs the county $60 a day to house a prisoner in Bexar County Jail, which often is overcrowded, he said. That equates to $2.7 million taxpayers must pay each year to incarcerate the parents, he estimated.
Hand in hand with the cost is the problem of jail overcrowding.
“I think there has to be a better way to do it,” Wolff said.
‘Release and reset’
In Bexar County, fathers or mothers whom the Texas attorney general has targeted as in arrears on payments usually aren’t brought into court unless they have been delinquent for months or years.
Once at Bexar County Courthouse, many work out deals with prosecutors or the other parent on the spot. If the case remains unresolved and a judge finds a defendant at fault, he or she may be put on probation or sent to jail until a lump sum can be paid.
Even if released, those found at fault frequently are summoned back for updates on their payment status. The intensive “release-and-reset” strategy can result in more people being jailed, judges said.
A parent could be jailed up to six times in a year for missing payments or failing to appear in court, Bexar County officials say.
The county’s use of “flash incarcerations” may be different from other counties, where jail time is viewed more as a last resort, University of Texas family law Professor John Sampson said.
That appears to be the case in Dallas County, which has roughly the same number of child support cases as the San Antonio area, but far fewer people being sent to jail.
Both counties collected similar amounts of child support payments — between $262 million and $265 million — last fiscal year. Dallas, however, sent 160 deadbeat parents to jail.
“I guess it’s a carrot-stick approach,” said Judge George Collins, who oversees one of Dallas’ four child support courts. “When you can’t seem to encourage them anymore, you lock them up.
“We’re not big on putting them in jail. We’re big on collecting money.”
‘Doesn’t add up’
San Antonio attorney Lisa Dossmann has seen the differences in judicial philosophies firsthand, having worked for child support offices with the attorney general in Dallas and Bexar counties before going into private practice a decade ago.
On her first day in Rausch’s court after transferring from Dallas, the case she was prosecuting resulted in jail time.
“I was stunned,” she said. “In Dallas, they gave them a lot more time to come up with the money.”
Like other attorneys and judges interviewed for this report, she sided with both of Bexar County’s child support judges, even though she’s now a defense attorney.
“I think it’s a fair approach,” she said, explaining that her clients rarely end up in jail because she warns them of the consequences. “If the client comes up with some kind of lump sum, even if it’s a low amount, the judge isn’t going to incarcerate them.”
And when they do refuse to pay, incarceration often will spur family members to chip in to make a payment so the defendant can be released quickly, she said.
Although Bexar County’s system is different from other counties in Texas, it does seem to be effective, said Janece Rolfe, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s Child Support Division.
“It is a program that (prosecutors) are very pleased with,” she said.
But with a child support collection rate on par with Dallas County, Bexar County’s judicial philosophy doesn’t make sense, Wolff said. Once a person is in jail, he’ll lose his job or can’t look for work.
“It just doesn’t add up,” he said. “Obviously, all of the other counties have come to the same conclusion except for us. ..... You’re putting them in there with the criminal element. ..... Jail should be for the protection of the public.”
Wolff said he has been critical of the incarceration rate for most of his political career with the county. But it’s the elected district court judges who hire the child support court judges, and so his griping has had little effect, he lamented.
Why so high?
Senior state District Judge David Peeples sees a parallel between getting a child to obey and making a parent pay child support. Like the threat of spanking, incarceration can persuade a parent to follow court orders.
“You need that possibility of going to jail hanging in the background,” he said.
Peeples, who oversees the two child support courts in Bexar County and nearly two dozen in the region, knew the incarceration rate was disproportionately high in Bexar but was unaware of how high.
Peeples speculated that could be somewhat reflective of Bexar County’s low-income population, and judges’ vigilance in pursuing low-income defendants who might slip under the radar in other jurisdictions.
It might not be as lucrative going after a deadbeat parent who’s poor, and it might not add a lot to the total collections tally, but the money collected — even if a smaller amount — is significant to the other parent struggling to raise the children, Peeples said.
Still, he said, the numbers need to be carefully examined.
“If we’re not getting any more bang for our buck, you’d wonder why we do it,” he said.
Peeples also joined other judges, such as Delia Carian, Bexar County’s other support court judge, and Harris County child support Judge Gregory Wettman, in voicing skepticism that the incarceration statistics have been submitted the same way by each county.
“I’ve got to believe they’re just counting it different,” Wettman said.
Carian, who has been on the child support bench in Bexar County for three years, admits she and Rausch are tough. But she never thought of that as an anomaly.
“To me, it seems like everybody has the same position,” she said.
Representatives with the attorney general’s office said the agency is reviewing the numbers, but so far no reporting discrepancies have been found.
Neglected children
Inside Rausch’s and Carian’s court chambers are lists of every defendant in jail for owing child support. The files are revisited weekly.
While fathers like Luna theoretically could stay in jail indefinitely if the ordered amount isn’t paid, chances are the most hopeless cases will result in releases from jail after a few days or weeks, Rausch said.
The released prisoners then will be brought back to court months later to see if their attitudes have changed, he said.
Over the course of two days in the first week of June, Rausch ordered 48 people released — about five of whom paid the demanded amount.
“I’m sympathetic with the jail population issue,” said Rausch, who has been on the bench for nearly 22 years and serves on the National Judicial Child Support Task Force.
“It does no good to put someone in jail and intend for them to stay there and serve out that sentence,” he said. “I’m hoping their time in jail taught them a lesson.”
At the very least, he said, it gets the attention of other parents waiting in the courtroom — most of whom won’t end up in jail.
On a recent day this month, prosecutors in Rausch’s court collected $15,000 in back payments for children who’d previously been neglected.
Rausch, who said he had a great relationship with his own father, finds it frustrating to see parents neglecting the needs of their children. He has seen scores of children cry in his office because of an absent parent. While he can’t force parents to have relationships with their children, he does have the tools to make sure they support them, he said.
“We’re tough — very tough,” he said. “My bedrock philosophy is, if you’re going to bring a child into this world, you have to support that child. The court system is the only entity that can enforce that.”
And if that means jailing parents, so be it.
“If you place significance on a parent’s obligation to support the child, I don’t see where there can be any other approach,” he said.
