PARENT'S RIGHTS NOW!

In the article "Question: Is Court-Ordered Child Support Doing More Harm Than Good?"* authors Stephen Baskerville, Ph.D. and Geraldine Jensen present two compelling and opposing arguments. However, we submit that the wrong question is being asked. The better question which was posed by Tony Fantetti is "Should 'deadbeat dads' face jail time?" As Mr. Fantetti points out, many fathers cannot meet their financial obligations. And he then goes on to suggest:

Those demanding the incarceration of fathers in arrears on child support should themselves be jailed for their own overdue payments to their creditors. After all, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Discriminately incarcerating one class of people (fathers) for overdue financial obligations in a society, and not incarcerating others who are guilty of the same, amounts to a state-sanctioned discriminatory inquisition.

Perhaps all single mothers with delinquent and outstanding medical bills for treatment of their children should be summarily jailed? If a father becomes involuntarily unemployed following massive layoffs, and is without income and therefore "refuses" (or so he's accused) to pay his child support should be jailed for being a "deadbeat," then it logically follows that a mother who "refuses" to seek medical treatment for a sick child simply because she is without the means to pay is also without a valid excuse and should be locked up as well.

Of course, we--as a society--would never even consider incarcerating a mother merely for being financially irresponsible, particularly without hard empirical evidence that spending some time "in the barb-wired hotel all dressed up and nowhere to go" would somehow teach those mothers how to be responsible. Otherwise, Octoplet Mom would be spending time in Los Angeles County Jail rather than spending time with Dr. Phil. So why are we so eager to take this approach with fathers? Should we not at least answer the question of whether jailing "Deadbeat Dads" is doing more harm than good. Should we not consider not just whether THE RECESSION is contributing to homelessness, but whether it is impacting on the ability of fathers to continue to pay child support at the Court-ordered levels as well.

*http://www.ejfi.org/family/family-30.htm

According to A.C.L.U. Criticizes Jail:

We wonder how many of the Los Angeles County inmates are incarcerated for failure to pay debts. And we wonder how the living and safety conditions in Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail compare to the living and safety conditions in Berkeley County South Carolina where an inmate was recently beaten to death by a fellow inmate. And we wonder if the Los Angeles County Men's Central Jail is as crowded as the Charleston County South Carolina Jail. And we wonder whether the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail is either profiting from inmate labor or using more inmate slave labor than is being used by either the State of Ohio or by Berkeley County South Carolina. And we wonder if the Los Angeles County Sheriff's wallet is getting fat as inmates are growing thinner.

At the end of the day, there is little or no oversight over how these jails are run, so it is no wonder that they are often used as cash cows and free labor pools. Slavery is alive and well in America--especially, it appears, in South Carolina.

Click ACLU opens Charleston office to read the article from The Post and Courier. Scroll down the page to read reader comments. Frankly, while we expected some opposition to the A.C.L.U.'s presence in South Carolina, we were surprised both at how misinformed people are regarding this organization and how vitriolic and personal they were in their attacks against it. Still, we predict that unless Dorchester County Council and the Town of Summerville get busy returning "prisoner processing funds" and doing something about some of their gutter service problems that they will be writing some seriously large checks to the A.C.L.U. in the near future. Likewise, we predict that the South Carolina Legislature, the Charleston County School District, and Beaufort County Council will soon be sending some large checks to the A.C.L.U.

As we previously noted a couple of months ago, The New York Times reported A.C.L.U. Votes to Take Over State Branch. And last week The Post and Courier reported ACLU to open its first office in state.

Now that "the Calvary has arrived," we wonder how long it will be before Dorchester County is forced to compensate the inmates who provided free "voluntary labor" and South Carolina counties are forced to provide free attorneys for alleged contemnors facing incarceration of one year. We also wonder whether Sheriff Ray Nash will be able to provide documentation concerning who "volunteered," where they worked, the number of hours they worked, and the types of services they performed.

Given Sheriff Nash's well-documented poor record-keeping, we suspect that he will not be able to provide this information and that, if he could, it would prove embarrassing to both Dorchester County and to certain county council members who turned a blind eye to this sorry practice because doing so was either to their political or personal benefit.

The New York Times recently reported A.C.L.U. and State Branch Spar. Now the newspaper has reported A.C.L.U. Votes to Take Over State Branch.

We have long believed that the South Carolina Affiliate of the A.C.L.U. could do more to protect the rights of parents. Therefore, we cannot say that this development caught us completely by surprise. However it remains to be seen whether the takeover of the South Carolina Affiliate will be beneficial to South Carolinians or whether it will be detrimental. We think that in the short term, it will probably be beneficial because cases like the one discussed in this post are likely to be expedited. However, we think this development will hurt South Carolina in the long run because so many of our lawmakers seem intent on passing legislation that will further their own agendas without regard to either the constitutionality of the legislation or the costs of defending the legislation against valid legal challenges. In other words, our prediction is that more and more of our tax dollars will be going into the coffers of the national A.C.L.U.

ACLU OF SC URGES SC SUPREME COURT TO ORDER FAMILY COURTS TO APPOINT COUNSEL TO INDIGENT DEFENDANTS FACING INCARCERATION FOR NONPAYMENT OF SUPPORT

Read the ACLU Press Release here.

All we can say is "It's about damn time!" As noted in the Amici Curiae Brief of the ACLU, the Sixth Amendment requires that Court appoint counsel to represent indigent defendants when imprisonment is a possibility and that "[because imprisonment is a possibility in non-payment cases] "[t]he Sixth Amendment applies in equal force to defendants charged with contempt for nonpayment of child support."