Driver’s License Suspensions among Child Support Involved Fathers: Prevalence, Patterns, and Implications for Employment and Earnings

• In Event: Impacts of Child Support Policies and Payments on Wellbeing of Children and Parents

Abstract

Increasingly, drivers’ license suspensions are used as a penalty for failure to pay monetary fines and fees. This includes, in some states, failure to pay child support. In Wisconsin, the site of this study, an estimated 4,000 parents receive a license suspension each year due to child support arrears. The use of driver’s license suspensions as a penalty for noncompliance with child support orders raises concerns about unintended negative consequences, including loss of employment and difficulty with subsequent child support payments. Driving without a license, furthermore, creates substantial and potentially escalating legal risks for parents. Existing research on child support-related license suspensions is mostly based on cross-sectional data. As a result, we know little about the cumulative risks of suspensions for child support-involved parents, nor the downstream consequences. We do know, however, that compliance with support orders declines over time, and therefore that parents’ are increasingly at risk for a license suspension over the life of their support orders.

We leverage merged administrative data from the State of Wisconsin to examine the patterns and cumulative risk of drivers’ license suspensions for child support-involved nonmarital fathers. Additionally, we estimate the associations between suspensions and subsequent employment, earnings, compliance, and criminal charges associated with driving with a suspended license. Our sample consists of all fathers with a non-marital birth during 2015-2019 who received a child support order. We link fathers to longitudinal information on child support orders and payments, child support-related license suspensions and their duration, quarterly data on employment and earnings, and criminal charges. We also incorporate information on the characteristics of both parents, and annual data about the neighborhoods in which fathers live over time, including rurality, commuting patterns, and availability of public transportation.

Preliminary descriptive statistics show that suspensions are more common among non-white fathers and fathers earning low wages. Importantly, while just three percent of fathers experience a suspension in the first year of the order, over 15% of fathers ever experience a suspension in the eight years following the order, with an average time from order to a first suspension of about 3 years. These findings highlight that suspensions are not uncommon and annual snapshots may underestimate prevalence of suspensions for child support involved fathers. Ongoing work leverages multivariate analyses to understand how having a suspension is associated with changes in a) the probability of a father being employed, b) his earnings, c) his child support compliance, and d) risks of a criminal charge, as well as how these risks vary based on the characteristics of where fathers live. This work sheds new light on the prevalence and implications of a child support enforcement strategy that, while aimed at strengthening compliance, may have unintended negative consequences.

Authors

• Judith Bartfeld, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Megan Doherty Bea, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Co-Author

• Alison Lynn Berube, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Presenting Author

• Jungjin Koo, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  Non-Presenting Co-Author