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Comment by kobeya | Hacker News Reader

> In my state thousands of men are in jail for non-payment of child support

... how does that make any sense?

The American criminal system tends to punish individuals over treating problems. It is, at very least, internally consistent.

It doesn't. Courts take hardship into account, but only retroactively. If you had a good job, then lost it, your required payments will not automatically be adjusted. You will need to petition the court for an adjustment - which apparently many people lack the awareness or resources to do.

Well I'm not sure how automatic payment adjustment would work - seems easy to defraud.

Petitioning the court for an adjustment is a fairly low cost approach; both partners' 1040s in the US / T4s in Canada would be compared on a rolling average or similar formula to adjust the payments. Self representing for this isn't out of the ordinary, if costs need to be saved.

On the topic of courts, there is a lot of severely misleading legal misinformation in this thread. I really really encourage people to read reliable resources (aka not the comments here) before making decisions.

A good example of a reliable resource is [0], which is a fairly comprehensive list of divorce outcomes by state, co-written by an MIT CompSci professor. It also includes excerpts from interviews with very experienced divorce attorneys in most states.

If you don't like this site for some reason, there are other good resources too. Please don't just believe the comments here as gospel truth.

[0] http://www.realworlddivorce.com/

All court proceedings are about finding fault.

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