Family & Corrections Network

THE NORTH AMERICAN CONFERENCE ON FATHERS BEHIND BARS & ON THE STREET

Two worlds of practitioners

by Lorin Harris
Associate Program Officer
C.S. Mott Foundation

(Selected remarks from the closing plenary session of the North American Conference on Fathers Behind Bars and on the Street)

This is the first opportunity for two worlds of practitioners that serve fathers to come together and learn from each other. The buzz I've been hearing from conference participants has been great. Peer exchange I've observed from the conference participants has been phenomenal.

The staff and leadership at FCN and the National Practitioners Network for Fathers and Families deserve respect and credit for their hard work in putting this conference together. Jim Mustin and Preston Garrison worked countless hours together make this event succeed. They deserve credit for this effort, but it's not the end of this work.

We hope that this is the first of a series of future conferences. Last year under the leadership of Jeremy Travis, the Urban Institute launched their re-entry initiative. There's lots of interest around public policy as it relates to incarcerated fathers and reintegration and re-entry.

Momentum is building. There's a range of national organizations that can be resources to you. You can visit the National Center for Strategic Nonprofit Planning and Leadership web site at www.npcl.org. There's also the Center for Fathers, Families and Public Policy at www.cffpp.org and the National Center on Fathers and Families, www.ncoff.gse.upenn.edu.

Looking back, in the mid 1930's during Roosevelt's New Deal, we find public policies intended to help war torn families headed by women widowed as a result of the war. Two key programs were Aid to Dependent Children Program (ADC) and what is known today as social security. Child support was also born out of that work and more fully developed and matured over time. Today, child support collects financial support from fathers to support their children and also defrays the cost of administering a public welfare system. Over time, child support has become stronger and more devolved to states.

We know that not all non-custodial fathers are middle income men who can afford to pay child support, commonly referred to as 'deadbeat dads.' Many are 'dead broke dads' with incomes below the poverty level for a single individual. We need policies that enable these dads to first become independent and self-sufficient, but then to move to being emotionally and financially involved parents.

Child support is beginning to see it can be more father friendly and family friendly by helping low income fathers care and provide for their children. There's quite a way to go. In some of the demonstration sites, we see child support enforcement coming along in collaborative partnerships with community-based organizations like yours. I encourage forming partnerships and collaborations with your local office of child support enforcement.

The central issue is poverty. How do we ensure that low-income children are escaping poverty? Children don't work, so interventions that seek to move children out of poverty must work to move their parents out of poverty. On average, children do best in two parent biological families. Not that single parent family homes don't produce great children, obviously they do. Absent a two parent biological household, the Mott Foundation and other foundations have attempted to bring the father back into the life of the child in as responsible a manner as we can and to equip those fathers to be much more responsible and engaged parents.

During the start of the ADC program in the mid 30's to the period of the shift of AFDC to TANF in 1996, there was an explosion of single female-headed households and out-of-wedlock births. Around 1965, the number of national out-of-wedlock births was near five percent. About a third of all children born in the United States are out-of-wedlock. Around seventy percent of all African American children are born out-of-wedlock; in the Latino community about half; and in the Native American community about half. On a parallel track, there's been an explosion in our incarcerated population. Our incarcerated population in the mid-seventies was close to 300,000. We now are topping 2,000,000. We lead the industrialized world in the number of folks that are in closed societies, prisons. It appears these two parallel policies have impacted family formation.

Large numbers of men, who make up better than ninety percent of our prison population, have been displaced from communities into prisons. The impact has been deleterious to the formation and maintenance of two parent families. The notion that you can maintain a family with a father incarcerated, with any parent incarcerated, is counterintuitive to the idea of the formation and maintenance of two parent families. Distancing parents from their communities is an incredible strain on those families. The practitioners in this room have been struggling with those issues - struggling for resources and without very good research or very good data to evaluate their programs. While philanthropy is now taking an interest in this issue, not only the Mott Foundation, but others, there's still a long way to go.

Child support and welfare policy and practice, has not supported keeping fathers in the home. Under the ADC program and the AFDC program, you could not have an able bodied man residing in the home and still allow the mother to collect benefits. We have certainly stepped away from that considerably under TANF, but we have something of a double standard. Two parent families receiving TANF support have different work requirements than single female-headed households.

How do we move toward a more perfect system? We have to engage those systems that have the purview or the oversight of the folks that we're concerned about. Unfortunately we don't have programs analogous to TANF for men. We don't have men moving in and out of a social welfare system like TANF that we can point to. Other than prisons, there is no public system where we find our men residentially. We need to engage our corrections system, bring them to the table to dialogue about how to we can responsibly engage these fathers in the lives of their children.

A criminal record impedes a father's ability to find employment. The labor market has shifted over the last thirty years considerably. There's a greater demand for skilled labor, there's less of a demand for folks who don't have a high school diploma minimally. Employers have moved jobs often, if not out of the country, certainly to the suburbs. Meanwhile we have large numbers of people, disproportionately minorities, living in central cities. How you connect those folks to those jobs is not so clear as of yet. We have twenty-five states in our country that add non-criminal support as a felony conviction on their records. We need to revisit some of these policies that are not so, in my mind, either well thought out or the consequences are not well acknowledged at this point. We need to think about how we can restructure public policy so that it really does meet the fourth goal of welfare reform, the formation and maintenance of two parent families. How can we think about child support, so it's not just a system that's concerned with collections, but also enables two parent families?

I have fifteen public policy recommendations:

Reduce our use of incarceration in this country. (applause) In both criminal matters and civil matters, particularly around issues of child support, there is an over utilization of incarceration in the United States. Twenty-five states use a felony conviction as the highest form of sanction for non-criminal support. This suggests that we haven't been very thoughtful about the impact that criminal conviction will have on the ability of a father to either find employment or retain a job.

Diminish distance barriers between incarcerated parents and their children. How can poor families, low income families find their way a hundred miles or more to prisons from the communities that they live in on the few resources that they have to make ends meet on a day-to-day basis. One may argue that's the custodial or the non-custodial parent's fault for getting locked up, and that's a valid argument, but I would say that if we revisit some of these issues around the use of incarceration as a punitive measure we might find ourselves either locating folks closer to home, or reducing the time that they spend in prison altogether.

Make the cost of telephone conversations between offenders and their families as reasonable as possible. The price gouging that's occurring around phones is a serious challenge to the formation and maintenance of two parent families.

Develop more effective data coordination and data matching between child support and corrections. A few states are doing a decent job of sharing information on fathers who come into prisons and have a child support order, or have not established paternity. We have some promising practices to help those fathers establish paternity, then modifying child support orders or attempting to modify child support orders so the father is not building thousands of dollars in debt he can likely never repay while he's incarcerated or after he's released. Except in extreme cases, offenders need to be afforded the same due process rights with regards to child support matters as any other father

Re-examine the utility of incarcerating dead broke fathers for non-payment of child support. In those twenty-five states where we have such laws, it seems to me that some advocacy for those organizations like those in this room might help to bring that issue to the table in your state legislatures and may facilitate debate that may lead to a policy shift or a policy change.

Create policy that encourages child support compliance among recently released fathers. Reach out to your local office of parole, engage them in conversations about how you build a system that has on the front end some carrots and some sticks for helping fathers establish and modify child support orders but also on the back end has some carrots and sticks for helping fathers do the same, modify orders, be an engaged and responsible dad.

Provide coordinated post release program and programs that link fathers to their needs. These include housing and community-based employment training programs, mental health programs, HIV and substance abuse treatment.

Think about raising the minimum wage. $5.15 an hour simply doesn't lift a family out of poverty. Some studies have suggested that the moms who disproportionately have been leaving welfare have been exchanging welfare poverty for working poverty. How do we break the cycle of poverty for low-income families? Part of the solution is the earned income tax credit, but another part is raising the minimum wage.

Support public policies that encourage employers to make jobs readily available for former offenders as they are currently available for other currently low-income workers. We have to begin to see ex-offenders as a part of our larger countries population of low income, low skill workers. The question shouldn't be how we parcel them out, but how do we include them into that system. I agree with conference presenter Tom Petersik's suggestion that we normalize the labor market for ex-offenders.

Build relationships. Develop a solid understanding of our local offices of child support enforcement folks. Where we don't have those relationships we need to begin building them. Once you develop personal relationships, you can move mountains in many instances. We have to develop relationships that can really lead to collaboration of both child support enforcement and the criminal justice system. Become advocates for fathers with child support enforcement and elected officials, and the service providers.

Consider hiring younger staff. (comments from the audience). That wasn't an ageism comment, but listen folks, I do think we need a balance. There's certainly tremendous value added by folks who've been both in the field and in the practice for as long as some of us in this room have been. I spent the last couple days with a young man here at the conference and I'm not that much older than he, and I find myself somewhat out of touch, and I'm far younger than some of the others of us in the room. So I feel if I'm out of touch, we can certainly do a better job of staying in touch.

Diversify recruitment sources. If you're interested in recruiting low-income fathers and you've not thought about a variety of sources to do so, you'd be well served by contacting some of the national resources that I'd mentioned before related to technical assistance.

Diversify funding resources. We have to make sure we aren't over-relying on single source or sole source funding and that we have a nice mix and balance of public and private support.

Continuously engage in self-evaluation, from our peers, from our program participants and where we can afford it, independent evaluation.

Expand research and evaluation on child support and incarcerated fathers, labor markets and incarcerated fathers, the impact of incarceration on children and on family formation, re-entry issues facing incarcerated fathers, the use of incarceration, and responsible father programs.

Thank you.