The Role of Legal Representation in Reducing Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Child Support Outcomes

When non-custodial parents (NCPs) fail to pay child support, they can face various enforcement mechanisms including both administrative and judicial enforcement. Disparities by race and socioeconomic status persist throughout the system. One key example of this is that racially and ethnically minoritized NCPs are disproportionately underrepresented by attorneys at court. It is quite possible that this underrepresentation contributes to the overrepresentation of racial and ethnic minority groups among those experiencing negative child support outcomes (e.g., burdensome orders, judicial enforcement actions). However, the extent to which this is the case, as well as whether expanding access to legal representation can reduce such disparities, has yet to be empirically examined. The primary focus of this study is twofold: to examine the role of legal representation in closing racial and ethnic gaps in 1) setting burdensome child support orders and 2) enforcement actions (e.g., warrant issue, incarceration) after a contempt hearing.

The data are drawn from multiple data sources stored in the Wisconsin Administrate Data Core. Court-related information is elicited from the Wisconsin Court Record Data, a sample of child support-related cases filed in 21 Wisconsin counties. Records on the enforcement of the child support cases, orders and payments are drawn from the Kids Information Data System. Incarceration records only come from the Milwaukee County Sheriff’s Department because data on other county jails are not available. The primary sample is comprised of the most recent cases where the father is designated as the payor and the mother the payee that were filed with the courts from July 2007 to December 2018. Due to the data limitation, the sample used for analyzing enforcement actions is limited to those in Milwaukee County. The gap-closing estimand method which is to hypothetically assign an intervention to both socially-constructed groups is employed in the analyses. Three largest racialized groups (Hispanic, non-Hispanic Black, and non-Hispanic white) are examined to ensure the sufficient sample size.

Finding suggests that legal representation in the setting of child support orders plays a role in closing the Black-white gap in having burdensome orders, but not Hispanic-white gap. This null finding in Hispanic-white gap may be due to a smaller sample size of Hispanic group that limits statistical power. No evidence is found that legal representation at contempt hearing closes racial and ethnic gaps in enforcement action outcomes. Given that most NCPs are given an opportunity to lift the contempt charge (e.g., purge condition) regardless of being represented by attorney, there may be no direct relationship to subsequent judicial sanctions.

Despite profound racial and ethnic gaps in child support outcomes that are often determined at courts, the role of legal representation in closing these gaps has yet to be studied. This study suggests partial effectiveness of legal representation at reducing disparities: it helps reduce gaps in setting burdensome orders in the first place but not in enforcement outcomes. This implies that more efforts are still needed to uncover mechanisms that perpetuate racial and ethnic gaps in the child support system.