Abstract
In Prisons of Debt: The Afterlives of Incarcerated Fathers, Lynne Haney once again takes on an enormously complex topic, seeking to understand, explain, and explore the experiences of formerly incarcerated men with child support debts. She accomplishes this through a combination of policy analysis, ethnographic observation, and in’depth interviews, which she conducts in multiple sites across three large states: California, New York, and Florida. This sophisticated and complicated work makes many empirical and theoretical contributions, several of which stand out and which I highlight here.
The first major accomplishment of this book is a comprehensive account of the waves of child support reform over the past four decades, highlighting the ways that the federal government has shaped state child support policy, especially around the relationship between child support and income assistance. In a variety of ways, child support has been used as a mechanism to reduce government spending on public assistance. Sometimes this was based on the premise that custodial parents receiving child support payments would not need public income assistance, while other times this took the form (and to a large extent continues to take the form) of the government recouping the cost of public assistance provided for a child from the noncustodial parent. Another component of the influence of federal law on state policy is how these developments lead to disparate policies and practices across the country.
On top of this sophisticated tracing of the relationship between federal and state laws and their paths of development over time, Haney generates two distinct yet overlapping conceptual frameworks to explain behavioral patterns of the men in her study: the debt of imprisonment and the imprisonment of debt. The debt of imprisonment, described in Chapter Two, focuses on uncovering the many mechanisms, or feedback loops—operating simultaneously and in multidirectional ways—through which incarceration leads to the accumulation of so much debt. This includes the initial setting of child support orders, setting retroactive support, interest and fees, modification (or difficulty with modification) during incarceration, and the accruing of child support during incarceration based on determinations of potential earnings and in some cases voluntary unemployment. While these processes operate in locality’distinct ways they occur throughout Haney's sites.
The imprisonment of debt (detailed in Chapter 4), on the other hand, refers to the ways that child support enforcement amplifies both debt and criminal legal involvements through several financial, familial, and legal feedback loops. All three of these loops, which are often intertwined, are mechanisms by which child support enforcement strategies result in outcomes in direct odds with the goals of both the child support and criminal legal systems. In combination with these loops, the legally authorized child support enforcement apparatus takes several forms that both directly and indirectly undermine these fathers’ efforts to become law’abiding, financially stable, responsible parents. These include wage garnishment, tax/public benefit intercept, driver’s license/passport revocations, and both civil and criminal contempt of court incarceration stays. Haney delineates how these mechanisms unfold in Chapter Three of the book. A key observation shown in this chapter is how the state conflates fatherhood with financial support and discounts the validity of other forms of paternal caretaking.
Haney next describes the experience of indebted fatherhood and the ways it manifests (Chapters 5 and 6). At two opposite ends of the fathering spectrum are the “superheroes” and the “unapologetically absent.” As she details in Chapter Five, both of these outlier groups represent a small portion of the men in her study. Those who fall into the “superhero” category (that is, men who are able to successfully navigate their reentry and manage their child support debts) are largely able to do so due to support. This support often comes in gendered forms, such as from female kin or from women who work as social workers providing assorted forms of public assistance. Those in the “unapologetically absent” retreat from both fatherhood and their child support obligations, turning away from formal employment and institutions and leading to heavy sanctions for noncompliance and sizeable growth in their child support arrears. As discussed in Chapter Six, most men, however, fall in between these two extremes and engage in what Haney refers to as “cyclical parenting,” which is essentially a pattern of parenting and meeting obligations in waves, rather than consistently. Cyclical parenting, Haney argues, is damaging to the relationships that fathers build with their children as well as with custodial parents, due to their inconsistency.
Finally, in her conclusion, Haney refreshingly offers a series of concrete policy recommendations that would help to reduce the barriers to successful reentry and fatherhood detailed throughout the book. Importantly, she argues, reforms ought to be blended between the criminal justice and child support systems to be most effective. Some tangible suggestions offered include federally defining incarceration as involuntary unemployment, ending public assistance payback policies for incarcerated parents, and revising the Bradley Amendment to require an exemption for incarceration from the prohibition on debt forgiveness. Another set of material policy solutions Haney recommends includes providing greater public assistance to fathers and reducing the punitive noncompliance responses to unpaid child support arrears. But perhaps the most powerful yet difficult solution Haney proposes is shifting the cultural narratives around fatherhood to recognize the important roles that fathers play in their children's lives beyond their financial contributions, acknowledging the precious social value that fathers’ caretaking has on the lives of their children.
As is the case in all groundbreaking studies, Haney's book generates new questions for future examination, especially regarding the effects of indebted fatherhood on the lives of custodial parents and children. Her analysis points to gendered distrust as an outcome of current policies and practice, and future scholarship can use this as a starting point to build from. Additionally, as Haney points out, very little is known about how the children of indebted fathers fare. Since children and their well’being are the primary moralized justifications for the debts accrued by their fathers, assessing how child support and reentry practices shape child outcomes and the perspectives of these children is a paramount next step for researchers concerned with poverty governance and child well’being.
Another clear set of questions that logically follows from this study surrounds the extent to which Haney's findings hold true in other locales, such as those with lower accumulations of child support arrears. However, this book in and of itself is a major accomplishment in both its breadth and depth, providing social scientists with foundational knowledge on the heretofore underexamined experiences of the sizeable population of marginalized men reentering society post’imprisonment with child support debt.