The Procedural Justice-Informed Alternatives to Contempt (PJAC) project sought to increase parents’ compliance with child support orders by using procedural justice principles to increase trust and confidence in their processes and to reduce the use of contempt for noncompliant parents. The federal Office of Child Support Enforcement funded six local child support agencies to implement a demonstration of these strategies. The evaluation of PJAC used a random assignment design and included implementation and benefit cost studies. As a subcontractor to MDRC, MEF led evaluation operations and implementation research in two sites, authored project briefs, and led the cost-benefit analysis. MEF also led a follow-up qualitative study of how child support programs responded to the COVID-19 pandemic and implications of these changes for longer term changes to the operations and policies of the child support program.
