But what about the dads? It’s almost as if all these unfortunate conceptions were immaculate. The fathers, in most (66 percent of all out-of-wedlock) cases, are never identified. And, if identified, they are almost never forced to be responsible for their acts. Only 18 percent pay child support. This is a remarkable scandal. “Anything we expect of the mothers,” says David Ellwood, a noted welfare-reform expert now working in the Clinton administration, “we have to be able to expect from the fathers.”
If we can find them. In Racine, Wis., they are working hard at it, and making progress-but it’s not easy. Racine is one of two counties in the fourth year of an experiment launched by Gov. Tommy Thompson, one of the rare public officials who take welfare reform seriously. It is called Children First. The governor summarizes it succinctly: “If Where’s Papa? ‘Wanted you can’t pay child support, we put you to work doing community service [without pay]. If you’re not willing to do that, we put you in jail.” And they do. Last week in Racine, eight men were sitting in the county jail for failure to pay child support. “We’ve got some slow learners,” said County Executive Dennis Kornwolf. “But the word’s beginning to get around that we’re serious.”
Indeed, most-77 percent-of the deadbeat dads sent into the program simply choose to pay up. For those who can’t, community service is loosely defined. It can include job training, job searching or parental-responsibility classes. Few actually wind up shagging litter for the county without pay; the emphasis is on finding work. “We have three goals,” says Jean Rogers, the program administrator: “To get them to pay, to pay more and to pay more frequently.” Pay they have. A recent study shows that Children First has increased the number of child-support payers by 83 percent and the amount paid by 237 percent. This is, at once, impressive and modest: most child-support offenders in Racine still manage to beat the rap. “In Wisconsin, we’ll find a third and get them to pay, and there’s a third we’ll never find,” says Kevin Van Kamp, a Racine Family Court commissioner. “This program gives us a shot at the other third.”
Wisconsin works harder at this than most other states. Its 33.4 percent enforcement rate ranks second in the nation. Children First is succeeding in Racine only because the county already had an unusually assiduous “daddy locating” apparatus in place-with a population of about 175,000, it initiated 972 nonsupport hearings last year, which required an average of about 350 hearings of one sort or another each week, which, in turn, required the full-time attention of 35 employees (as well as a sophisticated computer system and a sympathetic state law that automatically garnishees the payments from the father’s salary). Most communities in most states don’t have the will or the wherewithal to make that sort of effort; most politicians would rather spend money on schools and highways than on welfare reform.
Paternity pool: Tommy Thompson has tried a half-dozen different (some quite controversial) approaches to the problem and managed to reduce his state’s caseload by 17 percent since 1987-but the out-of-wedlock birthrate is soaring and there is a sense of swimming against the tide. The welfare system pays for one out of every three births in Wisconsin; a recent study of major welfare hospitals showed that paternity was established in less than 40 percent of the births. Remember, the state collects from only a third of the fathers it can find: one third of two fifths is, hmm, very depressing-maybe 13 percent of all “welfare fathers” in a state that really works at making the daddies pay.
Even if the paternity pool could somehow be enlarged, the hordes of public employees necessary to bring a program like Children First to a city the size of, say, Milwaukee, would be staggering. Which may be why no one talks about child-support enforcement very much; coercing the mothers who receive the checks is much easier. But unless something is done to reach the dads, the immaculate conceptions will continue-indeed, out-of-wedlock births have exploded nationally, from 544,000 in 1978 to 1.1 million in 1990, each bringing with it a greater likelihood of criminal behavior, ill health and welfare dependency. Children First gives a hint of where the solution to this disaster may lie, but also of the enormous resources that will be required to get there.
