Posted on 12/25/2013 1:17:13 PM PST by ColdOne
Critics are calling the practice the new "debtors' prison" -- referring to the jails that flourished in the U.S. and Western Europe over 150 years ago. Before the time of bankruptcy laws and social safety nets, poor folks and ruined business owners were locked up until their debts were paid off.
Reforms eventually outlawed the practice. But groups like the Brennan Center for Justice and the American Civil Liberties Union say it's been reborn in local courts which may not be aware it's against the law to send indigent people to jail over unpaid fines and fees -- or they just haven't been called on it until now.
Advocates are trying to convince courts that aside from the legal questions surrounding the practice, it is disproportionately jailing poor people and doesn't even boost government revenues -- in fact, governments lose money in the process.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
From what I have read, they don’t imprison them for the fine, but for failure to show up in court.
The county I used to live in regularly jailed deadbeat dads who did not pay child support. They’d get hauled up before the judge and he/she’d ask them (in handcuffs) are you ready to start paying and keep paying?
I think that’s entirely appropriate.
Does the court in your county also give the fathers say in how their child support payments are spent on their children?
Or is just turn the money over to the single mom and then shut up and go away?
No, apparently not as in many, many places in this country.
However, it IS recordable support that can be used in consideration when/if these single moms (who don’t use it for the kids) goes asking for TANF, WICs, SNAP, etc.
In any case, if a court orders the support we can grumble all we want about how the ex spends it, but it is a moot point. My only point is that if an ex gets child support, she can’t go off and claim she has no support at all and go asking for welfare handouts.
That may be true for some, but courts and officials are jailing people for not paying fines and other fees - when these things should be dealt with in the standard ways of attaching wages or grabbing tax refunds, along with other collection tools.
First, they seize all your assets and accounts, and put a lien on any property you own.
Second, they send you a "formal" form-letter notifying you.
Third, you are ordered to pay them what they say you owe them.
Fourth, you are told to appear in their "special" court to pay them or be incarcerated.
Sound familiar?
If the government owns your body, they can do anything they want with it, including imprisoning or executing it.
We’ll wind up having “free” healthcare, but NO FREEDOM!
If the amount of the support payment would leave the father without sufficient funds to live on is that entirely appropriate?
Family courts are frequently set up to only allow review of child support every three years. If a father looses his job in that three year period the court does not want to hear about it and the father is SOL!
Yes I had a business in Chicago and I’d let homeless guys do some chores for a few bucks. A few days later I’d find out there in some downstate jail for not paying child support m
Yeah...you have never had to face the semi-annual trip to family court for the child support raise. You know the one...they one that gets automatically imposed on you while you live like a cockroach and your ex-wife lives in a McMansion and does Florida in February every year and the "shore" every summer while pleading poverty driving a new car, while you show up to court in a rusted out 1908 Olds Cutlass that you bought for $350 ?
You mean THAT child support judge ?
It won’t be free. And the freedom will be gone.
around here the buzz words are “potential income”..
Friend had a 6 figure job.. Lost it (thanks Obama!!) and was able to get a much lower paying wage job..
Child support said “well your potential income is still 6 figures!”
The amount the county demands he pays is 90% of what he takes home at his current job. Thankfully he and his ex are on good terms and she returns much of it to him or he’d be under that bridge or in jail.
No I haven’t. But your bad situation is not license to have the only opinion that can be valid.
My express point is that as a taxpayer, PAID child support payments are rightly more preferable than having the taxpayer foot the support bills.
Get ticked all you want. But instead of being pissed at me, maybe you should get pissed at your lawyer instead.
I am not pissed at you. I am pissed at the courts and the laws. (By the way I have no kids of my own and have never divorced)
I know men that have to put up with unreasonable demands of family courts. I have one living in my rental. He too frequently asks me to give him an extra week on the rent.
If the children of these men were still in an intact family with these fathers and their father lost his job and that father had to work at half his former wages that family would have to survive on those wages. Why can’t the law and the courts recognize that fact and adjust the child support payment to agree with reality. .
And in all reality what good does it do the state to put a man in jail that can’t make his child support payment? Is he going to earn the money in jail?
“Get ticked all you want. But instead of being pissed at me, maybe you should get pissed at your lawyer instead.”
And perhaps you shouldn’t go off half-cocked about child support. Plain truth is men have no rights in the so-called family courts. None. Pay or go to jail.
Oh by the way. In Ohio and I think most states, if the father does not make the payment the ex gets nothing. The state doesn’t make it up.
In Ohio the father pays the county and the county cuts the ex a check. If the father doesn’t pay the county the county doesn’t pay the ex. But the county keeps track of what the dad owes and issues threats and or warrants.
It’s a form of legalized extortion. Only difference being that when you’re at the receiving end of a mafia extortion racket, Guido and Luigi don’t reference fine moral principles and so-called legality to justify it.
Gregg Abbott, is that you? Shouldn’t you be excepting a white knight award from some Fem-dom group and not wasting time on Freerepublic?
You can’t get blood from a turnip, no matter how hard you squeeze.
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