crossposting from >>>/liberty/8959
>The Fifth Amendment guarantees that “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” does not prevent family courts from jailing parents on civil contempt for weeks, months, or even years without trial. In December 2003, in response to a letter from the American Civil Liberties Union, a Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, judge freed some one hundred prisoners who had been incarcerated without due process for allegedly failing to pay child support. The fathers were sentenced with no notice given of their hearings and no opportunity to obtain legal representation. ACLU lawyer Maila Brink says courts across Pennsylvania routinely jail such men for civil contempt without proper notice or in time for them to get lawyers. Fathers relate the hearings typically lasted between thirty seconds and two minutes, during which they are sentenced to months in jail or prison. … Nothing indicates that Pennsylvania is unusual … one hundred such prisoners in each of the America’s 3,000 counties is by no means unlikely.
>In South Carolina, where Walter Scott was killed for running away from a cop trying to arrest him for being behind on his child support, a full one-eighth of the inmates were jailed over child support arrearages. Many of these child support judgments are simply absurd. As The New York Times reported that, “A 2007 Urban Institute study of child support debt in nine large states found that 70 percent of the arrears were owed by people who reported less than $10,000 a year in income. They were expected to pay, on average, 83 percent of their income in child support.” Some cases are even more of a farce. One man was ordered to pay $30,000 in child support for a child who wasn’t his and a 15 year old boy was ordered to pay child support to the 34 year old woman who statutorily raped him. And it can happen to women too.
https://mises.org/library/unhappy-union-marriage-and-state
After we're done ending the War on Drugs, can we end the War on Brendan?