Abstract
Child support enforcement is among several contexts in which work requirements are enforced by incarceration for noncompliance. Rather than creating barriers to employment, such incarceration threats may pressure subjects to work more, under worse conditions. We test for this using Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study data on respondents’ child support, labor market, and criminal justice experiences in twenty cities. We exploit intercity variation in absolute and relative reliance on different child support enforcement techniques, especially punitive ones, such as incarceration, versus financially extractive ones, such as wage garnishment. As predicted, heavier reliance on incarceration sanctions is associated with more hours of work and lower wages among noncustodial fathers most vulnerable to incarceration.
- © 2020 Russell Sage Foundation. Zatz, Noah D., and Michael A. Stoll. 2020. “Working to Avoid Incarceration: Jail Threat and Labor Market Outcomes for Noncustodial Fathers Facing Child Support Enforcement.” RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences 6(1): 55–81. DOI: 10.7758/RSF.2020.6.1.03. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, and the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment. The analyses offered are the authors’ own and do not necessarily express the views of any funder. We received helpful feedback from Naomi Sugie and invaluable technical and research assistance from the UCLA School of Law Empirical Research Group, especially from Henry Kim. Direct correspondence to: Noah D. Zatz at zatz{at}law.ucla.edu, UCLA School of Law, 385 Charles E. Young Dr. East, Law Building 1242, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1476.
Open Access Policy: RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences is an open access journal. This article is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.