William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice
Abstract
Within America’s justice institutions, the child support system has become a business. The intended mission of aid has been traded and abdicated through contractual deals to churn vulnerable families into factory-like revenue operations. Juvenile and family courts across the country have partnered through countless intertwined interagency contracts with human service agencies, prosecutors, attorneys general’s offices, probation departments, and policing offices—all aimed at generating revenue from impoverished children and parents rather than serving their best interests. The resulting child support factory is vast, harmful, unconstitutional, unethical, and grew from a racist history that devastated Black families, and still operates with starkly disproportionate racialized impact.
The child support system established by Title IV-D of the Social Security Act is an immense operation of the federal and state governments, processing approximately eighteen percent of all children in the United States in the fiscal year 2022. The history of the IV-D system is interlinked with slavery, Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, Poor Laws, and Bastardy Acts. This history reverberates into current practices, and the harm is monetized, as the IV-D system is increasingly viewed by state entities as a source of revenue rather than a means of providing aid.
This Article uncovers vast unconstitutional contractual mechanics in our justice systems that are not addressed by other scholars. Part I sets the stage by explaining the harm and racialized impact inflicted by the current IV-D child support system. Part II exposes how America’s justice institutions are expanding and generating revenue from the harm through a web of interagency contracts—and analyzes how those contractual operations are unethical and unconstitutional. Part III looks back to understand the racist history that still permeates the IV-D system operations, a devastating history that is now monetized. The Article concludes with a call for ending the child support factory harm, in the hopes that our institutions become more ethically true to providing justice and welfare for the people rather than using the people to serve themselves.
This abstract has been taken from the author's introduction.
Repository Citation
Daniel L. Hatcher, Child Support Factory: Racist History, Harm, and Unconstitutionality of the Child Support System's Contractual Operations, 32 Wm. & Mary J. Race, Gender, & Soc. Just. 335 (2026), https://scholarship.law.wm.edu/wmjowl/vol32/iss3/2Included in
Constitutional Law Commons, Family Law Commons, Law and Race Commons