Kathryn Z. Davies has served as an Onondaga County Support Magistrate in the Fifth Judicial District of the New York State Unified Court System for the past 25 years.
Prior to her appointment, she worked for the Onondaga County Attorney’s Office, where she supervised county attorneys working in Family Court. In the spring of 2011 she spoke with Norma Feldman about the Parent Support Program.
How did you get involved in the Parent Support Program?
The Center for Court Innovation approached us and said they had a grant to address issues of child support similar to other problem-solving courts and asked if we could work together on that. It was not only me, but the other support magistrates as well. We said, “Sure… anything that would help.”
What were your initial feelings about the Parent Support Program when it was first described to you?
I was pleased to see a job program come in. We haven’t had one for a while. This was the first one that was court-based. It was nice to finally have one that was court-based. That was my first thought. If it’s going to be court-based, maybe we’ll get some feedback. My real concern about the programs is feedback. I send people off to them but I never get any response from program staff. This program provides the feedback.
How is the feedback working for you?
It’s working very well. We have a track on our calendars that shows who’s involved in the Parent Support Program and when one of those cases comes up, the Resource Coordinator gives us a report as to what the participant’s status is. Sometimes it’s somebody I didn’t even know had been referred to the program because they were referred by another magistrate.
The Parent Support Program partners with an organization that also has a required parenting component. Do you think this makes a difference?
The people who have gone through it—it sometimes changes their attitudes about how they look at themselves and their children and the court. But, for the most part, the feedback has been that they’re not participating unfortunately, and even that is valuable to me as a support magistrate. It lets me know that the referred person is not doing what they need to do in terms of looking for work or trying to help their families. So, even when the program is not successful in finding the jobs, it is successful in aiding the court in making a determination as to what to do in the future.
Would you see that as one of the advantages of having this referral mechanism?
Yes, definitely. It helps me decide whether the parent is in willful violation of the court order or not. If they’re out there going to all these programs and doing what they need to do, then I’m thinking that they’re really working at trying to get a job and doing what they need to do for their families. But if they’re not complying, then I look at it as somebody who’s really not doing what they need to do and I will look at probation or other types of things. It’s been valuable that we can now make an order requiring them to do it, whereas when the program started we couldn’t. We had to have a change of law.
Could you explain that? How did the law change?
We were always able to tell people to go to programs when they violate a support order, but we weren’t able to tell someone to go to a program when they came in on an initial support petition. New York State changed the law so that now we can say to them on an initial petition, “You have kids. You need to go out and get a job.” That’s something that’s different now. That’s something that just changed in October [2010]. That was a very beneficial change.
Are there other tools that you have to help people comply with their child support orders?
Yes, there are some other tools, but they’re not beneficial to the person. They’re more punitive, such as taking away drivers’ licenses, recreational licenses, and that kind of thing. The Support Collection Unit withholds tax refunds and there are all sorts of things that they do. In terms of this program, it actually gives a benefit to the parent if they follow through. I mean they can reap benefits as a result of it. The program provides counsel to eligible participants. I’ve seen people who’ve gotten assistance in getting a certificate for release of disability if they’ve had a past criminal record. I’ve seen people who have gotten assistance in getting identification, because lack of identification has been something that prevented them from finding work. The program does a lot in terms of helping people get back on track.
What role do you think programs like the Parent Support Program can play within the justice system?
The Resource Coordinator works with people and has the opportunity to sit down with them and to talk to them about the child support system. People have strange ideas about the court system. They see it as prejudiced on behalf of the custodial parent. If the custodial parent is woman and I’m a woman, I must be prejudiced against men. There’s this built-in feeling that we’re prejudiced one way or another. The fact of the matter is that I don’t look at it as a man-woman thing. I look at it as a parent-child thing, because it doesn’t matter whether it’s a man or a woman who’s got to pay the support. They still have the same problems with it. I think the Resource Coordinator sometimes has the opportunity to sit down with them and just talk to them about some of those issues and try to put a friendlier face on the court system, sort of as a liaison between the litigants and the court to a certain extent. They see it as the system against them, and the Resource Coordinator can sometimes help them with that, which is a good thing. I can’t get into personal conversations with litigants because that prejudices my case, but as somebody who is outside of that, the Resource Coordinator can sit down with them and say, “Look it, the judge is just trying to get this for your kids. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to be doing?” She can really talk to them about their feelings about being a victim of the system.
You’ve seen a lot of employment programs come and go; have you learned any different lessons from this experience?
In formulating the program, the program needs to look at the big picture before the grant is written. I think if this program had been written to focus on violation proceedings, working with people who had violated orders of support that were already existing, I think it would have had more teeth to it from the beginning as a problem-solving court.
If someone wanted to replicate the program, what would you advise?
I would first decide what the program is trying to do. Are you trying to deal with people who are not complying or are you trying to get people to comply from the inception of the order? If you want to include everybody, then you have to have the law in place right from the beginning to order people into the program. When our program started we were ordering people into the program, but they didn’t have to go. Now they do, but even still it’s going to take a violation petition to get anything done if they don’t go. If you have a violation proceeding and you say to them, “You have to go to this program,” and they don’t go to the program then you can say, “Okay, put him in jail”…and that’s the problem-solving court approach to compliance. The problem you have with any job program is, unlike a drug rehab program, it’s not something someone can do within the six-month period of time of a court case. Sometimes the problems are bigger than the time frame we have here, particularly in a support part of court. There is something you have to understand about the support magistrate’s role. Our part was actually devised by the federal government to be an expedited part, so we can’t say we’re going to wait, and wait, and wait. That’s one of the problems we’ve run into as support magistrates.
Is there anything we didn’t touch upon that you would like to talk about?
I like having the program. When I can send the non-paying parent to a program, that alone gives the custodial parent some hope that something might change in the future. I think there are some other things that need to be done in terms of getting people back to work. We have an underground economy that is big and I would like to see people leaving the underground economy and going to work again. I think that can happen, but we need to have more incentives. Right now, most of the mechanisms put into enforcing child support have been pretty punitive. A program like this gives us some positives to offer, which is a good thing, but there are not enough programs that actually offer positives to help us get parents back into the paying economy.
