Child-Support Amnesty Program Hailed : Five-County Experiment Labeled a Success but Reiner Disagrees

A five-county experiment that granted amnesty from prosecution to absent parents who made good on delinquent child-support payments was “an unqualified success,” state health and welfare officials declared Wednesday.

However, Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner, who resisted putting a similar program in place in Los Angeles County, attacked the whole approach and claimed even better results by arresting delinquent parents. A deputy to Reiner promised another crackdown next month.

The five counties that granted amnesties--Orange, Riverside, Kern, Santa Cruz and Sacramento--increased their child-support collections almost $2 million during the amnesty period between June 16 and Aug. 16, said state Health and Welfare Secretary David B. Swoap.

That represented an increase of almost 14% over the same period in 1984, said Swoap, who helped launch the program at the suggestion of feminist attorney Gloria Allred and former Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Robert Philibosian.

However, the district attorney’s office in Orange County challenged figures that Swoap attributed to the amnesty program there. Child-support collections did increase by $340,000 over the same two-month period in 1984, as Swoap said. But Bruce Patterson, chief of the Orange County district attorney’s child support division, said only $12,000 can be “definitely attributed to the amnesty program.” He said that came from four parents who walked into the district attorney’s office and asked for amnesty.

Reiner’s office rejected the amnesty approach and instead made a highly publicized series of more than 200 arrests of delinquent parents around Father’s Day. Reiner claimed this resulted in a $2-million--or 44%--increase in child-support collections when compared with the same period in 1984. The July collections were 75% more than the year before, a deputy to Reiner said.

Reiner explained that his office planned the 1985 arrests to coincide with the mailing of 24,000 letters to parents, virtually all of them absent fathers, who were at least $500 in arrears in child-support payments.

“There was no grace period,” Reiner said in an interview Wednesday. “We told them, ‘If you don’t come in and immediately take care of this, we’ll issue a warrant for your arrest.’ ”

Allred, the Los Angeles attorney who promoted the amnesty, blasted Reiner at a Wednesday press conference at the Capitol for failing to meet with her in March to discuss her proposal.

“We’re not going to let one public official who has a know-it-all attitude, who lives in an ivory tower, have the last word on this issue,” she said.

But Reiner dismissed her criticism as an effort to claim credit for a program that she has had little to do with.

“An amnesty program is an easy way out for any office,” Reiner said.

Santa Cruz County Dist. Atty. Arthur Danner, who participated in the amnesty program, was enthusiastic, however, about using it as a way to call attention to a problem that he described as serious as child abuse. He said his office asked for “significant jail sentences for those who didn’t use this program.”

Next year, he said, his county will try an amnesty again.