What people, especially the custodial parent, seem to forget is that once that man is arrested and locked up for ‘failure’ to pay child support, the life of that man becomes drastically complicated. Getting a job to support that child becomes much more difficult because he that father now has a felony or an arrest record which he’ll have to dislose on job applications. Once that disclosure is made on a joib application, the chances of getting any decent job is out of the window. The ripple effect is that the child(ren) who ‘interest’ the system appeared so eager to protect is now left to without fatherly supervision or without a father figure in his/her life. That child grows up stumbling through life picking up mostly dangerous habits and exposing himself/herself to all kinds of risks. The irony of it is that the same system that pretends to be for that child’s best interest is waiting to swallow that same child into the prison system.

Like the writer correctly pointed out, so much negative focus is brought to bear on the man. The woman is totally absolved of any responsibility while the man is demonized. Yes, there are men that have no involvement in their children’s lives, emotionally or financially, and that is unacceptable. If a person is unable not unwilling, to take care of his children, the solution should not be imprisonment or the destruction of that person. Society ought to be seeking ways to see that those parents find employment so they can assume their parental obligation, emotionally, economically, spiritually, etc. The more black men that are locked up in jail for child support violations, the more black male population in the American prison system increases, the more endemic poverty rises in the black community, and the more bleak the future is for our next generation.

There is plenty of blame to go around for both parties involved in the support tussle. However, our women are given unfettered access to this court to bring as many men as humanly possible and they are given state representation to ensure that the targets of this child support system are firmly bound in new slavery type situation. We can talk or blame fathers/mothers all we want, nothing has or will change in this regard. Many of us simply bought into this fallacy that child support administration is there looking out for the interest of our children. If this is so, why are many of our children ending up in ocrrection facilities nationwide?