Doing Borrowed Time: The State, the Law and the Coercive Governance of ‘Undeserving’ Debtors

Abstract

This paper documents the shift toward increasingly coercive means of collecting debt from working class and poor borrowers, with a specific focus on incarceration. Placing this trend within an historical trajectory, it is argued that the law has always been central to creating and securing the social relations of debt as class relations. While the abolition of debtors’ prisons in the 19th century helped to shift struggles between debtors and creditors out of public view and into the depoliticized realm of ‘the law’, a number of factors have led to its reappearance in the contemporary era. These include (1) changes to bankruptcy legislation that have given creditors greater power over debtors, (2) the emergence of the debt-buying industry and (3) the growing privatization, decentralization and commercialization of the state, which have transformed it into a creditor that relies on its power to punish to compel payment from some of the poorest debtors.

Categorizing Competence: Consumer debt and the reproduction of gender-based status differences

“…Managing debt in the current financialized economy is a key attribute for socio-economic success (Davis, 2009; Mahmud, 2012). Accordingly, the status of actors in the realm of debt and credit is likely to impact both access to credit as well as the terms of contracts (LeBaron, 2014; Riaz, 2016; Roberts, 2014). In this regard, how male and female credit card borrowers are portrayed in the media with respect to their competence in managing debt can compound gender inequality.…”

“…Research in the area suggests that in an increasingly “financialized” economy (Davis & Kim, 2015), understanding how inequality is manifested in the financial realm—including spending, credit, and debt—can offer substantial insights into inequality’s persistence (Fligstein & Goldstein, 2015; Mahmud, 2012; Rajan, 2012). In particular, consumer debt is a focal point for studying issues of inequality because terms of debt contracts and access to debt are closely linked to underlying societal inequalities (LeBaron, 2014; Riaz, 2016; Roberts, 2014). Research on gender inequality in the financial realm has focused on structural and material aspects but has given limited attention to cultural aspects.…”

Neoliberalism, mass incarceration, and the US debt–criminal justice complex

“…As Goldberg (2006: 727) notes, by 2006, there were over 6,500 debt-collection agencies operating in the US, growing by 25% in merely three years. In the same year, as Roberts (2014: 673) indicates, debt-buying firms purchased more than $100 billion in consumer debt, with the four most profitable firms increasing net income by over 700% between 2001 and 2006. Several oligopolistic firms currently dominate the debt-collection market, with Encore Capital as the largest and most profitable.…”

“…As debt proliferated with the ascendance of capitalist relations of exchange in the early 19th century, the prison’s capacity to harbor debtors from creditors became seen as a threat to the collection of debt (Peebles, 2013). Abolished at the federal level in 1833, the eradication of debtors’ prisons in the US, as Roberts (2014: 676) suggests, was part of a reconfiguration of class relations to enshrine limited liability for expanding enterprises, while creating ‘new, more efficient, means for creditors to compel repayment’ from debtors. Despite the legal cessation of debtors’ prisons, relations of debt and criminalization continued to play central roles in the configuration of Black lives and labour.…”

“…As numerous theorists have argued (Gill, 1995; Gill and Bakker, 2003; Roberts, 2017), disciplinary neoliberal policies are geared toward securing property rights, consolidating investor interests, liberalizing markets, stabilizing prices, creating obedient work forces, and solidifying the ideological and regulatory supremacy of the market. Such policies have been implemented unevenly across different regimes through numerous economic, political, and legal institutions, expanding the structural power of capital globally and enforcing market discipline for the poor (Gill, 2003; Roberts, 2014). Applying this framework to the US, this article examines the marketization of social support systems and debt and bankruptcy infrastructure alongside the emergence of the mass incarceration system since the 1980s.…”