Imprisoning non-payers of child support is fucking dumb. Depending on the state, it costs 6 to 12 times more money to imprison the child support non-payer than to simply pick up the tab and pay it. It should also be abolished for the simple fact that any form of debtor's prison should have been left in the Victorian era.

So just think, with all that money that the big, strong, jackbooted government uses to put a man behind bars to try to look oh so tough on crime, it could have paid off the debt of 6 to 12 delinquent child support payers and actually helped the children. Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face on a whole societal level! As you can see, it's purely about punishment, not protecting the children who are cynically used as justification for these inhumanely punitive policies.

Also, if the man is in jail, he's paying absolutely nothing, but if he's free and not paying child support, at least he's paying taxes, which will go towards the government-funded child support.

I think this perspective is very important for the debate around legal paternal surrender/paper abortion. The government has played divide and conquer with its resources so well that it has managed to misdirect the anger even of people who are generally in favor of a strong welfare state.

Instead of getting angry at men for not paying child support, especially those who never wanted to be fathers in the first place, we should be mad at the government for wasting large sums of money imprisoning non-violent offenders when the government could just pay off the child support for a tiny fraction of that cost.