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Organizing for Deterrence: Lessons from a Study of Child Support

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Richard Lempert
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Abstract

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This study reanalyzes data collected by David Chambers on the enforcement of child support orders in Michigan. It finds that organizational factors interact with sanction factors to determine levels of general deterrence. Where the agency charged with enforcing child support orders, the Friend of the Court, is proactive and jail is a relatively common punishment for those who persist in not paying, overall collection rates are markedly higher than where neither or only one of these factors exist. The study also examines special deterrence and finds a special deterrent effect apparently associated with the experience of being jailed for failing to pay support. In the course of the investigation a number of contingencies important to deterrence theory are identified, and a behavioral response to threat—the avoidance response—is defined.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , 1982 , pp. 513 - 568
Copyright
Copyright © 1982 The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

*

In preparing this article, I benefited from the opportunity to discuss it with groups of scholars at the American Bar Foundation, Indiana University Law School, the University of Wisconsin Law School, and the Yale Law School. In these settings and on other occasions I incurred debts to individuals too numerous to mention. However, the help of two people must be acknowledged. Peter Ward was primarily responsible for the statistical work which included both the replication of certain of Chambers' findings and the original analyses reported in this paper. I appreciated not only his speed and skill but also his sophisticated advice as to what statistical approaches were most appropriate. David Chambers' aid was indispensable to everything that follows. He gave me free access to both his raw data and his statistical analyses; he spent hours upon hours explaining the workings of the Friends of the Court Officers and the rationales behind his original coding decisions; and he gave an early draft of this manuscript the most helpful critical assessment it has received. The data analyzed in this paper were collected by Chambers with the aid of several grants, including one from the Law and Social Sciences Program of the National Science Foundation. My own work was supported largely by the Cook Funds of the University of Michigan Law School. The final revision of this paper was written while I was a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, Wolfson College, Oxford.

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