By Vicki Turetsky, Commissioner, Office of Child Support Enforcement
On Oct. 8, I participated in a White House panel about Children of Incarcerated Parents (COIP). Some might wonder why the Office of Child Support Enforcement would participate on such a panel. It’s an easy answer. Many children of incarcerated parents are in our caseload. They need the income that child support can provide. However, their parents usually have no ability to pay support when they are in prison. Unless the child support program steps in to reduce the support order, the incarcerated parent will face huge child support debts when he or she is released. Those unmanageable debts will undermine the parent’s ability to get a job once out in the community. These unmanageable debts also can serve as a barrier to family relationships. That situation undermines our goal—to obtain long-term, regular support for kids as they grow up.
We’ve learned through our work and research that children need their parents, and parents need their children, whether or not a parent is incarcerated. Incarcerated parents often say that the one thing that helps them to turn their lives around, to hang on, to get up every morning, and to keep going—that one thing is their kids. And children say that they miss their parents deeply when their parents are in prison.
We are making a conscious effort to develop family-centered programs, materials, and partnerships to help increase the chances of gainful employment and family repair upon release of a parent from prison.
- Parents often don’t realize that their responsibility to make child support payments does not stop automatically while they are incarcerated. Many states allow support orders to be changed, but noncustodial parents have to request payments be temporarily suspended. Our Changing a Child Support Order explains the process in place in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and the territories of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. The guide is available at federal correctional institutions and on our website.
- We’ve provided grants funding to more than 10 demonstration projects to help incarcerated parents stay connected to their children. Some of the grants focused on giving incarcerated parents the tools to be better parents after their release. Other programs help post-incarceration parents find housing and jobs so they can get back on their feet and begin paying child support again. You can find summaries of many of these projects in our “Working with Incarcerated and Released Parents: Lessons from OCSE Grants and State Programs (PDF)” guide.
- We’re conducting an eight-state demonstration project to test whether employment services offered to noncustodial parents, including some with a prior record, can help boost child support payments.
- We also partner with many programs that are focused on helping children and their incarcerated parents. We are an active member of the Federal Interagency Reentry Council and several of our staff work with the Bureau of Prisons in different regions. We have an entire web page on the FindYouthInfo.gov website dedicated to “Incarcerated Parents With Child Support Questions .”
- Our own website has a full page dedicated to Reentry issues. You’ll find fact sheets, information on other resource centers, and even a link to the Sesame Street “Toolkit for Parents - Little Children, Big Challenges: Incarceration ”.
We don’t believe time in prison or jail should be a barrier for any of the one million parents who want to have a loving relationship with their children. We also believe that parents deserve a second chance to get a job and support their kids once they leave prison. As a two-generation program, we try to work with both parents to improve the financial and emotional well-being of children. For information on our programs to help incarcerated parents, visit our Reentry webpage.