THE FIX
Office of Child Support Services told him about the Colorado Parent Employment Project (CO-PEP), an experimental program funded by a grant from the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement as part of its Child Support Noncustodial Parent Employment Demonstration, or CSPED. Colorado is one of eight states participating in the CSPED, which relies on a more supportive model of child support enforcement than the punitive model of years past. Participating agencies began the planning and implementation phase of the project in 2012, and the demonstration will run through September of 2017. The program, which is being evaluated by Mathematica Policy Research and the Institute for Research on Poverty at the University of Wisconsin– Madison, is a randomized controlled trial. Caseworkers identify and recruit eligible clients (specific criteria vary by state) and, once eligibility is confirmed, participants are then randomly selected to receive either standard services or additional services. At the end of the first year, the participating agencies had enrolled 3,266 noncustodial parents, and they hope to ultimately enroll 12,000. Over the last 50 years, both divorce and non-marital childbearing rates in the United States have soared. More
than 40 percent of children today are born to unmarried parents, and, in 2014, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, almost one-third of children didn’t live with both of their parents. These trends have led to a significant increase in the number of children with non-custodial parents who are expected to contribute financially through the child support system. In 2013, the government collected $32 billion in total child support and provided services to 17 million children. The non-custodial parents in these families are disproportionately low-income and face employment barriers that severely limit their ability to contribute. Surveys of CSPED participants, for example, indicate that almost 70 percent have some kind of criminal conviction; among participants who reported employment, average monthly earnings were only $683. In Colorado, that’s about 80 hours of minimum-wage work. Historically, the system has relied on punitive measures to ensure compliance. Parents who don’t, or can’t, pay face a debt load that increases with every month and an escalating set of consequences, many of which—the suspension of a professional or driver’s license, for example—can make it even harder to pay child support. “Many observers think that system
Wisconsin’s Grand Child Support Experiment HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED WHEN ONE STATE LET WELFARE RECIPIENTS KEEP THEIR CHILD SUPPORT PAYMENTS. BY DWYER GUNN
In 1997, the state of Wisconsin decided to experiment with the way it handled child support payments made to welfare recipients. In previous years, under the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program, recipients who also received child support
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payments from a noncustodial parent were required to relinquish the bulk of what they received in child support to the state— states only “passed through” the first $50 of child support in a given month. The federal welfarereform bill (formally
JULY/AUGUST 2016 • PSMAG.COM
known as the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act) of the previous year gave states room to experiment with and set their own policies. The majority of states decided to eliminate the passthrough entirely and simply retain all child support payments to welfare recipients, but Wisconsin instead implemented and rigorously evaluated a temporary, experimental full pass-through and full disregard program, in which recipients
could work if the main problem was an unwillingness to pay,” says Daniel Meyer, a professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the principal investigator on the CSPED project. “But the problem is actually not willingness—at least for some, they don’t have the ability to pay the amount we expect, so then a system that is only about punishment is unlikely to be very effective.” The specifics of the CSPED project vary from state to state, but all of the participating agencies are expected to provide four core services: enhanced child support services (which can include things like debt forgiveness), employment assistance, parenting classes, and case management. In Arapahoe County, which has a long history of experimentation with enhanced services, CO-PEP participants have access to a wide range of extras, but most are conditioned upon participation in the parenting class, which includes both a peer support component and a curriculum that covers, among other things, communication strategies and healthy relationship building. Lewis Griffin’s caseworker, for example, promised she would get his driver’s license reinstated if he attended the first two classes. Maureen Alexander, who is supervisor of special projects for the
retained all of the child support paid to them and their full welfare benefits. The AFDC-era child support pass-through policy reflects the historic purpose of child support enforcement: to allow the government to recover the costs of supporting children whose noncustodial parents had abandoned them. The policy, however, created a host of undesirable incentives for all parents, according to researchers.
“The dad says, ‘If my kids are no better off if I pay or if I don’t, why should I pay more money?’” explains Daniel Meyer of the University of Wisconsin’s Institute for Research on Poverty. Custodial parents also had little incentive to cooperate with the system since their income remained unchanged if they