ASHINGTON - Al Gore, decrying the steep rate of child poverty in homes without a father, yesterday proposed steps designed to crack down on deadbeat dads.
''It's time for fathers to accept their responsibility for their children,'' Gore said in a visit to Congress Heights Methodist Church, in the impoverished Anacostia neighborhood of Washington.
Gore proposed requiring states, as a condition for receiving federal child-support funds, to force noncustodial parents to go to work and pay child support. Those who don't pay would go to jail.
Standing in front of a semicircle of men who are involved in their children's lives and a mother of two whose former boyfriend is not, Gore said, ''There are too many absent fathers in our society today. There are too many mothers who are struggling because their partners are not helping them as they should.''
The vice president announced his proposal to reduce child poverty a day before his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Bill Bradley, is scheduled to make a long-planned policy speech on the subject, this morning at Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Bradley's aides were guarding closely the content of his speech, but a spokesman for the former New Jersey senator said, ''A primary focus will be helping poor people get more money in their pockets to help their children.''
Eric Hauser, the Bradley spokesman, said: ''Poverty, to Bradley's mind, is a national moral challenge, and we need a level of effort to take it on that's equal to the significance of the problem.''
Bradley, who has made eradicating child poverty a signature issue in his campaign, often captivates his audiences with an anecdote about a child who goes to school hungry one morning because her family is poor and it wasn't her turn to eat.
A Gore adviser said the vice president has been working for months on his child-poverty plan and that the announcement a day before Bradley's speech was ''an accident of timing.''
But Hauser doesn't buy that. ''It's pretty clear that he's trying to jump the gun on us. This was sort of quickly put together,'' Hauser said.
In his speech yesterday, Gore said child poverty is epidemic in female-headed households. ''Children with absent fathers are five times as likely to live in poverty,'' he said.
While most of his ideas were punitive toward deadbeat dads, Gore said it also is ''important to understand that yes, there are a lot of deadbeat dads. There are also dead-broke dads, as many as a quarter of all the fathers who are absent are either young, struggling fathers in fragile families that have lost their way, and they really don't have the means to support their children and they need help.''
His proposal includes allowing states to use federal welfare money for job-training and job-placement programs to help impoverished fathers. But these men also would be required to sign ''personal responsibility contracts'' acknowledging paternity, pledging to work to pay child support, and to be an involved parent in order to receive aid from the Welfare to Work program.
''Outside of a genuine religious experience, there is hardly anything that is more transforming in the life of a man than getting involved with his children,'' Gore said. ''We need to make it easier for that to happen.''
