Making Fathers Pay: The Enforcement of Child Support | 
| Author: David L. Chambers
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press
Category: Book
List Price: $55.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  3 reviews
Sales Rank: 2715760
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 380
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.1
ISBN: 0226100774
Dewey Decimal Number: 346.773017
EAN: 9780226100777
ASIN: 0226100774
Publication Date: September 1, 1979
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Red cloth with blue spine titles; no jacket. Half inch mark on rear cover; mild shelf wear. Inscribed on half title page; Clean interior; 365 pages.
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
A couple with children divorce. A court orders the father to pay child support, but the father fails to pay. This pattern repeats itself thousands of times every year in nearly every American state.
Making Fathers Pay is David L. Chambers's study of the child-support collection process in Michigan, the state most successful in inducing fathers to pay. He begins by reporting the perilous financial problems of divorced mothers with children, problems faced even by mothers who work full time and receive child support. The study then examines the characteristics of fathers who do and do not pay support and the characteristics of collections systems that work.
Chambers's findings are based largely on records of fathers' support payments in twenty-eight Michigan counties, some of which jail hundreds of men for nonpayment every year. Chambers finds that in places well organized to collect support, jailing nonpayers seems to produce higher payments from men jailed and from men not jailed, but only at a high social cost. He also raises grave doubts about the fairness of the judicial process that leads to jail. While Chambers's total sample includes 12,000 men, he interweaves through his text moving interviews with members of one family caught in the painful predicaments that men, women, and children face upon separation.
To increase support for children at lower social costs, Chambers advocates a national system of compulsory deductions from the wages of non-custodial parents who earn more than enough for their own subsistence.
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| Customer Reviews:
 my review August 7, 2006
One solution to child support collection problems is to make 50% joint custody the norm. Then there will be no need to have a hugh state beaurocracy enforcement. 50-50 joint custody means both parents will have equal rights and responsibilities, there will be no need for either to pay child support, no need to transfer money or have a state agency to monitor it. If one paren fails to live up to their bargin, only then the other could go back to court and petition for sole custody. The past 30 years have shown the entire social experiment is a failure. Now's the time to change the law and make a better system that works.
 Bad News Bears - Get the WitchHunters out!!! September 6, 2005
2 out of 5 found this review helpful
Here we go again. A totally unobjective review of the child support system in America. It is blantatly clear that any parent that skips out on their child in terms of not only financial support but emotional support has got some serious problems. However, the child support laws, enforcement policies and system are huge failures. This book instead treats them as a wonderful solution to the problem of the failed family unit in America - NOT!!!
First off, in cases where the custodial parent has a capable income they too are financially responsible for their children yet the laws explictily say this yet they are ignored - this book ignores this as well. For example a professional mother, earning 200,000 a year has her daughter's father's paltry income of 50,000 ganrished for child support. A year later she quits her job. Is that in the best interest of the child? If the father can't remove his financial support, how come the system allows the mother to remove hers (and in this case that would be a much larger impact on the child's living style than if dad was a deadbeat). The book never addresses the custodial parent's financial responsibilities even though they are clearly mandated by the law but ignored everywhere else. This is a huge problem with the current child support system.
Secondly, very few Fathers don't pay support and the amount of time, money effort, etc. that we put into chasing them down and jailing them clearly is not being used effectively. Additionally the laws are clearly destroying dads who are support of their kids and clearly do not need government intervention to tell them they must. The makes no mention of these problems.
Thirdly, there is no mention to the problem whereby custodial parents despite their equal responsibility see a credit rating increase at the receipt of child support where as the non-custodial parent sees a huge decrease. Why should that be - they both have to pay their share to support their child. Oddly enough, banks see child support as income - yet this money should not change the financial position of the custodial parent as it should be totally spent on the child. In fact that parent should be appraised the same way as the non-custodial parent as their percentage of their income should be going to the child in the same fashion. Any mention of this huge inequity in the book - nope - just one thing - get those deadbeats!
What about deadbeat moms - no mention of them in here, about 40% of moms don't pay their court ordered child support, only about 22% of dads don't pay. And there is a big difference with not paying in the two cases. In the mom's case it is predominantly total default.
This book attempts to play into what is politically correct and does so at the cost of equity, objectiveness and reason. That sucks. If I could have given it less than one star I would have.
Destroying families and fathers one case at a time. June 14, 2005
This is a well documented discussion of how to get blood from a stone, or put another way, how to enforce indentured servitude, a form of slavery, to the maximum advantage. It smacks of 17th century studies aimed a adjusting the size of cotton bales to maximize the total pounds of cotton each slave could load per day. What it fails to address is that indentured servitude, and all forms of slavery, have been illegal in the US since the Civil War. Of course David Chambers is a professor of law, and therefore blinded to moral or ethical considerations that might have been in his book. Instead of elimination of a hateful system of servitude of men, he proposes a massive tax on all non-custodial men to pay women for breaking up our families and taking our children. Unfortunatly you can't make wrong into right by doing wrong more effectively. Like the 99lb "optimum" bale of cotton, an optimum way of extracting money from men has little merit. Another father is driven to suicide every 6 minutes in the US after lawyers take away his family and bind him into the involuntary indentured servitude called "child support." This book fails to address any of the massive human toll or to propose any real solutions. It merely fantacizes about ways to tighten the already overstrained legal screws.
I'm sure that attorneys, judges, and bureaucrats who earn their livings on the backs of emotionally distraught fathers who are already suffereing emotionally from the loss of their children will enjoy the read.
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