This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 23rd, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

It is incoherence and counterproductive to jail people who owe child support or take away their driver's license.

After all, the stint in jail can render those same people less likely to live full lives and

meet those obligations.

Hido Senior Fellow Walter Olson discusses the pernicious cycle our justice system levels against those least able to fight back.

A driver's license for most people in modern society is more or less a prerequisite of being able to lead what we think of

as a normal life, access to most jobs.

Students can be an exception, retirees can be an exception and people who live in areas

a very thick public transportation maybe.

But for most people, if you want to have a job, have the option of more jobs if that one ends, you gotta have a car.

Like with using a driver's license as either a carrot or a stick depending on how you look at it and cases of people who maybe miss a child support payment and then go to jail,

it's not clear, it seems that the threat is what they want to get you to comply and haven't really

thought out what happens if you don't. There's a saying in chess that the threat

is always stronger than the execution and

You can say that the system has worked when the threat of being thrown in jail or the

threat of losing a driver's license that is critical to work causes some dad to fork over hidden money

that he wouldn't have paid toward child support.

But the threat often has to be carried through.

And the New York Times, when it reported on child support a few days ago, said that according to recent studies in South Carolina one in

eight inmates is sentenced for child support violations since 2010 in Georgia 3,500 have been jailed mostly doubts similar

numbers elsewhere and in the case of 70% of arrears, again citing one study from a few years ago, they were owed

...