“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.” 
 
 Walter Scott’s death has focused attention not just on police violence, but also on the use of jail to pressure parents to pay child support, a policy employed by many states today. 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. 
 
 The problem begins with child support orders that, at the outset, can exceed parents’ ability to pay. When parents fall short, the authorities escalate collection efforts, withholding up to 65 percent of a paycheck, seizing bank deposits and tax refunds, suspending driver’s licenses and professional licenses, and then imposing jail time. 
 
 “Parents who are truly destitute go to jail over and over again for child support debt simply because they’re poor,” said Sarah Geraghty, a lawyer with the Southern Center for Human Rights, which filed a class-action lawsuit in Georgia on behalf of parents incarcerated without legal representation for failure to pay. “We see many cases in which the person is released, they’re given three months to pay a large amount of money, and then if they can’t do that they’re tossed right back in the county jail.” 
 
 There is no national count of how many parents are incarcerated for failure to pay child support, and enforcement tactics vary from state to state, as do policies such as whether parents facing jail are given court-appointed lawyers. But 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. (The majority of noncustodial parents nationwide are men.) ||||| Chuck Burton/ap Anthony Scott holds a photo of himself (center) and his brothers Walter (left) and Rodney this week at his North Charleston home. Walter Scott was killed by a police officer after a traffic stop last week. The officer, Michael Slager, is charged with murder. 
 
 Some 15 years ago, long before Walter Scott's death by a North Charleston police officer made national headlines, a family court judge threw him in jail for 15 days because he hadn't made his child support payments. 
 
 Read more: For complete coverage of the Walter Scott shooting, go to postandcourier.com/Walter-Scott. 
 
 Scott already knew how the system worked — he owed support for two children, and then two more — but he claimed at the time that the Department of Social Services sent some of his money to the wrong mother. 
 
 Nevertheless, he went to jail. And then he lost his $35,000-a-year job at a film company. 
 
 “I got mad at everybody in the whole world because I just lost the best job I ever had,” Scott told The Post and Courier in 2003. “I just stopped doing everything. I just closed myself into a little shell and started doing things I shouldn't have been doing.” 
 
 He drank. He found odd jobs. Still, he couldn't make enough money to make the payments he owed. 
 
 “I didn't even care if I lived or died,” he said. 
 
 Then, Scott seemed to turn a corner. He was featured in an article about a promising program called “Father to Father,” designed to help men who had fallen behind on their payments. He admitted his mistakes, then turned himself in to the state for even more missed child-support payments. He spent another five months in jail. 
 
 “This whole time in jail, my child support is still going up,” he said. “I said, 'Man, you got four kids depending on you, and you got people in your life that love you. You got to get it together.' ” 
 
 Past due 
 
 Maybe Walter Scott eventually became the father he hoped he could be. Maybe “Father to Father” helped him find the footing he needed to support his family. Maybe it didn't. After all, those child support payments caught up with him again. 
 
 He owed nearly $18,104 in child support, according to court documents. He'd already been jailed three previous times. 
 
 “He said that's what he would do, he would run, because he's not going to jail for child support,” his brother, Rodney Scott, told MSNBC on Wednesday. Walter Scott, father of four, was a wanted man. Like untold thousands of other South Carolinians, a warrant had been issued for his arrest because, once again, he hadn't paid his child support. 
 
 State law allows county court clerks to issue bench warrants once these bills are only five days past due. The state can levy a variety of other penalties, including revoking someone's driver's license or garnishing their wages, for failure to pay child support, but many of the offenders languish in county jails across the state. There, child support bills continue to accumulate, setting many men up for a seemingly endless cycle of failure, some advocates say. 
 
 “I hate it to see when fathers don't pay child support,” said Sue Berkowitz, executive director of the S.C. Appleseed Legal Justice Center, but “killing someone over it — that's just mind-boggling.” 
 
 'Treating debtors like criminals' 
 
 Richard Barr, director of community development for the S.C. Center for Fathers and Families, called South Carolina's child support collection policy — known as “Rule 24” — among the strictest in the country. A bill five days past due hardly warrants jail time, he argued. 
 
 “That's tough,” Barr said. “If that happened to me every time my credit card came out, I'd be in trouble.” 
 
 Barr, and others, say child support enforcement shouldn't be a public safety issue anyway. 
 
 “When you make a family issue a policing issue, what you literally do is end up treating debtors like criminals,” he said. “It's very different to be wanted for murder and to be behind on a bill.” 
 
 DSS, which manages 75 percent of all child support cases here, said it doesn't know how many active warrants have been issued for men and women in South Carolina who have failed to make timely child support payments. Court clerks in Charleston and Dorchester counties would not provide their own numbers. 
 
 Sandra Holland, support enforcement supervisor for Berkeley County Family Court, said there are currently 1,103 active bench warrants for failure to pay support in Berkeley County alone. 
 
 “There is no question that there are lots and lots of people who are behind. The caseloads are phenomenal,” Berkowitz said. “At one point, a couple of years ago, our DSS child support attorneys had some of the highest caseloads in the country. They're dealing with huge volume and huge numbers and they don't always have the resources to track someone down.” 
 
 Supreme Court case 
 
 Berkowitz said the number of bench warrants issued for failure to pay child support seemed to abate after a U.S. Supreme Court case four years ago forced state child support agencies and family courts across the country to re-evaluate their policies. The federal case actually originated in the Upstate after Michael Turner, an Oconee County resident, was imprisoned several times for failure to pay child support. 
 
 The federal government determined incarceration may be justified in some of cases, but, by and large, “jail is not appropriate for noncustodial parents who do not have the means to pay their child support debts.” 
 
 “It really kind of stopped for a while,” Berkowitz said. “I didn't think they were picking people up or issuing bench warrants for child support.” 
 
 The number of bench warrants issued varies from county to county, Barr explained. Smaller counties with lighter dockets tend to issue more of them, he said. 
 
 Operation Work 
 
 South Carolina received an $8 million federal grant to launch “Operation Work” last year — a program that helps fathers who owe child support payments find ways to support their families. Only seven other states were invited to participate. 
 
 Operation Work is currently available in Charleston, Horry and Greenville counties. Fathers who qualify regularly meet with counselors, job coaches and program coordinators to make sure they're meeting their families' needs. 
 
 Almost 100 people have enrolled so far, Barr said. “We work with men every day who have never had a resume.” 
 
 Some of them also qualify for assistance to attend technical college or see a tutor for help with schoolwork. While they're enrolled in the program, their child support payments are suspended. 
 
 Unlike spending time in jail, where their debts keep adding up, Operation Work offers participants a temporary reprieve to establish work skills they need to earn money. 
 
 The alternative is a life in the shadows, Barr said, because “as soon as you get out of jail, you're a fugitive again.” 
 
 This is just the type of program Berkowitz said South Carolina needs. 
 
 “We've got to rethink how we help families,” she said. “Because you can't pay child support when you're in jail.” 
 
 Why he ran 
 
 Anthony Scott, Walter Scott's older brother, knows why he ran. 
 
 “I know why he ran away. We know why he ran away. Everybody knows why he ran away now,” Anthony Scott said. “I wasn't saying it before, but it's out there now.” 
 
 He didn't know how much Walter owed in child support or why he fell behind on his payments, other than to say he was “just living life.” According to Fielding Home for Funerals, Scott was a warehouseman at Brown Distribution before his death. The Associated Press reported he was a temporary forklift operator. 
 
 In 2003, child support payments were automatically drafted from Scott's paycheck. Back then, he earned about $800 a month. It is unclear how much money he made at Brown Distribution. 
 
 “If God ever blessed me and I came into some money, I'd help,” Scott told the newspaper 12 years ago. 
 
 But his brother said the deck was always stacked against him. 
 
 “I hate for anybody to get in the child support system. It can be trying. It doesn't seem to work out for them,” Anthony Scott said. “(Walter) said that it was crazy, that he couldn't wait to get over it. But once you're behind, you're behind.” 
 
 Brooks Brunson and Bo Petersen contributed to this report. Reach Lauren Sausser at 937-5598. ||||| The Scott family told NBC News that they were expecting a visit from the mayor, the police chief and a chaplain on Wednesday morning. 
 
 The confrontation occurred around 9:30 a.m. ET on Saturday after Slager pulled over Scott’s car because of a broken taillight. 
 
 The video, which was first obtained by The New York Times, picks up after the stop. Slager is seen shooting at Scott eight times as he runs away in a vacant lot. Scott drops to the ground after the last shot and Slager walks over calmly and is shown handcuffing Scott’s arms behind his back. Other police officers and later EMS tried to administer CPR but Scott died at the scene, according to an incident report. The video provided to The New York Times does not show those efforts. 
 
 The officer said the suspect took his Taser and that he feared for his life. 
 
 "Shots fired. Subject is down. He grabbed my Taser," Slager says in a call to dispatchers. 
 
 The video doesn't show Scott taking Slager's stun gun. But officials say Scott was hit with the officer's Taser because one of its projectiles was still attached to him. 
 
 The Justice Department and the South Carolina Office of the FBI are also reviewing the incident, which comes on the heels of other police-related deaths involving unarmed black males in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Cleveland and New York's Staten Island. 
 
 Slager was arrested less than an hour after the video, taken by a bystander, was provided to city and police officials. 
 
 Attorney L. Chris Stewart, who is representing the Scott family, said the victim may have tried to run from the officer because he owed child support, which can get someone sent to jail in South Carolina until they pay it back. There were no violent offenses on his record, the attorney added. 
 
 In his interview with TODAY, Walter Scott Sr. also suggested that his son ran because he owed child support. 
 
 “I believe that he didn’t want to go to jail again,” he said. “He just ran away.” 
 
 At a Tuesday news conference, North Charleston Mayor Keith Summey said the decision to charge the officer came after viewing the footage. 
 
 Having to charge an officer is "not something that we like to hear or like to say but it goes to say how we work as a community: When you're wrong, you're wrong and if you make a bad decision, don't care if you're behind the shield or just a citizen on the street, you have to live by that decision," Summey said. 
 
 Slager has been with the department for at least five years, officials said. 
 
 North Charleston Police Chief Eddie Driggers called the incident a "tragic day" for many, but said the shooting shouldn't reflect on the department's 343 officers. 
 
 "It is not reflective of the entire police department and the city of North Charleston," Driggers said. "One does not totally throw a blanket across the many, and I think that's true in life, so it is a tragic event." 
 
 South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley added that the shooting, as it appears, is unacceptable. "I assure all South Carolinians that the criminal judicial process will proceed fully," she said in a statement. "This is a sad time for everyone in South Carolina, and I urge everyone to work together to help our community heal." 
 
 At a news conference in front of the Scotts' Charleston home, his family remembered the father of four and Coast Guard veteran as a proud member of the community and said he “would never” have fought an officer over a Taser. 
 
 “Out of my brothers, he was the most outgoing out of all of us,” Anthony Scott said. “He knew everybody. … He was well-known in the community everywhere. He was just an outgoing type of person, and loving and kind.” 
 
 Anthony Scott said they were disturbed by initial reports that Slager said his brother grabbed the stun gun. 
 
 “I think through the process, we have received the truth. We can’t get my brother back, and my family is in deep mourning for that,” Anthony Scott added. “But through the process, justice has been served. I don't think all police officers are bad cops, but there are some bad ones out there." 
 
 Lawyers for the family said they are looking into filing a civil lawsuit against police. Attorney Stewart said the video will play key evidence. 
 
 "For the first time in a long time, an officer is going to be charged," Stewart told reporters. "What happened today doesn’t happen all the time," he added. "What if there wasn't no video, what if there was no witness ... then this (murder charge against the officer) wouldn't have happened." 
 
 The Associated Press contributed to this report.
– The friend in the car with Walter Scott right before Scott's police-shooting death on April 4 says he'll "never know why he ran." But Scott's family says it's because he was afraid of being thrown in jail again for not paying child support, according to the New York Times—and based on the Times' report, he may have had ample reason for that fear. The paper notes challenges faced by supposed "deadbeat" dads who are actually living in poverty, running up their support tabs because they couldn't afford them in the first place, then getting thrown in jail and losing their jobs—all while the debt builds. "Parents who are truly destitute go to jail over and over again for child support debt simply because they're poor," a lawyer for the Southern Center for Human Rights tells the Times. Part of the problem right from the start: Support orders are often crafted using not a parent's actual income, but what's called "imputed" income, which gauges how much the parent would earn at a full-time job that made minimum wage. Indeed, a 2007 Urban Institute study cited by the Times notes that 70% of child support debt in nine states was owed by individuals who reported $10,000 or less in income (some didn't report any income). The commissioner of the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement tells the Times that jail time was originally intended for people purposely hiding funds—not parents who couldn't afford the payments. Even a Supreme Court ruling from 2011 meant to prevent this from happening can prove futile, because some defendants can't afford lawyers to help them out, advocates say. In Scott's case, it was a cycle he apparently couldn't break. In a 2003 article on a new program in the Post and Courier, Scott noted he had enrolled in the program, meant to help dads catch up on payments, and voluntarily turned himself in for more jail time. "This whole time in jail, my child support is still going up," he said at the time. "I said, 'Man, you got four kids depending on you. … You got to get it together."