Walter Scott and child support

I've mentioned Walter Scott's murder twice before, but here's a third side of the case. The New York Times yesterday published Skip Child Support. Go to Jail. Lose Job. Repeat. which focuses on the completely idiotic approach to child support collection, though it seems a specific case of larger trends of both the criminalization of poverty and the breakdown of family structures:

By his own telling, the first time Walter L. Scott went to jail for failure to pay child support, it sent his life into a tailspin. He lost what he called “the best job I ever had” when he spent two weeks in jail. ... “Every job he has had, he has gotten fired from because he went to jail because he was locked up for child support,” said Mr. Scott, whose brother was working as a forklift operator when he died. “He got to the point where he felt like it defeated the purpose.”
... Though the threat of jail is considered an effective incentive for people who are able but unwilling to pay, many critics assert that punitive policies are trapping poor men in a cycle of debt, unemployment and imprisonment.

I'm not quite sure how "suspending driver’s licenses and professional licenses, and then imposing jail time" is supposed to enable the poor to repay debts and seems only to reenforce a culture of poverty.

Unless something's changed the same happens as well in Canada. e.g. back in 2010:

Paul had been paying regular child support since 1996. But during the trucking industry's recent hard times, Paul was temporarily unemployed, and missed two support payments.
Although he was soon back at work, Paul's commercial licence was suspended by the FRO. They refused to reinstate it without payment of $1,500 Paul hadn't yet earned. Their irrational licence suspension ensured he couldn't earn it.

That story didn't lead off with that but rather that Ontario had begun to seize cars as well of those owing child support. Again, not exactly a great way to make it easy to make a living. The same system seems to exist in Alberta as well.

As the original NYT story here noted, jail for nonpayment can be effective in some instances but the system definitely doesn't seem to be getting all those instances right. It seems to me that there should be a lot of justification needed to take away someone's means of earning a living if they aren't able to pay their bills.

If talking of over-incarceration the following bits of the NYT story seem worth noting:

in 2009, a survey in South Carolina found that one in eight inmates had been jailed for failure to pay child support. In Georgia, 3,500 parents were jailed in 2010. The Record of Hackensack, N.J., reported last year that 1,800 parents had been jailed or given ankle monitors in two New Jersey counties in 2013.