Working to Avoid Incarceration: Jail Threat and Labor Market Outcomes for Noncustodial Fathers Facing Child Support Enforcement

Abstract

We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, and the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. The analyses offered are the authors' own and do not necessarily express the views of any funder. We received helpful feedback from Naomi Sugie and invaluable technical and research assistance from the UCLA School of Law Empirical Research Group,

Locked Out of the Labor Market? State-Level Hidden Sentences and the Labor Market Outcomes of Recently Incarcerated Young Adults

“…For example, state-level poli-cies regarding child support could be useful in understanding the relationship between parental incarceration and child outcomes. This is especially important given that Noah Zatz and Michael Stoll (2020) show that the threat of incarceration to enforce court-mandated work requirements can push noncustodial fathers into low-wage employment. Thus, more research is needed to determine how hidden sentences afect individual, family, and community outcomes following arrests, convictions, and periods of incarceration.…”

Providing After Prison: Nonresident Fathers’ Formal and Informal Contributions to Children

“…This substitution means that children receive comparable cash support from their fathers across policy regimes, but the implications for the fathers themselves are real. Notably, the accrual of arrears and potential substitution of informal or riskier illegal work for formal employment may put fathers at greater risk of future incarceration (Zatz and Stoll 2020). The provision of in-kind support is consistently lower for formerly incarcerated fathers, but neither the size of that diference nor the frequency of provision is sensitive to the policies tested in this study.…”

“…Our measure of arrears and analytic approach also cannot fully capture the bidirectional association between arrears and incarceration, though findings were robust to excluding fathers for whom nonpayment of child support was the primary reason for incarceration. Specifically, child support nonpayment and the resultant arrears can lead to incarceration (Zatz and Stoll 2020), but arrears often accrue during incarceration due to the difficulty of modifying child support orders as well as after release due to men's impaired economic prospects. Although likely measured with some error, these indicators of fathers' contributions to their children's households are the best available and are consistently measured across waves in the survey data.…”

“…Fathers' accumulation of arrears leads to less engagement in the formal labor force (Miller and Mincy 2012;Cancian, Heinrich, and Chung 2013), further reducing their formal child support contributions (Cancian, Heinrich, and Chung 2013). Fathers who accumulate arrears can be incarcerated for child support noncompliance and continue to accrue arrears during incarceration (Cozzolino 2018;Zatz and Stoll 2020), suggesting the potential for long-term and compounding negative impacts of incarceration for formal child support and arrears.…”

“…The direction of these associations may difer by the type of contribution, however. Fathers involved in the criminal justice system may be incentivized to find formal employment in response to pressure from child support enforcement (Zatz and Stoll 2020) and probation requirements (Seim and Harding 2020). Unlike voluntary forms of support, formal child support is collected primarily through automatic withholding of wages earned in formal employment and thus mechanically related to fathers' employment and earnings (ACF 2016).…”