Market development, state formation, and the historical abolition of the debtors’ prison

Abstract

In the late 18th century, lenders’ right to imprison borrowers for defaulting on debts was taken for granted. By the mid-19th century, this power was widely and permanently revoked. Using a variety of archival evidence, this study explains the historical demise of the debtors’ prison in New York State, the first Western jurisdiction to permanently abolish imprisonment for debt. Tracing seven decades of contestation over moral aspects of credit exchange and incarceration, it shows that the development of capitalist markets, including their cultural and technological consequences, was necessary but not sufficient to render the debtor's prison obsolete. Rather, the development of a liberal polity and a penal state institutionalized new moral views about the use of force in economic exchange, consolidating the legitimacy of bodily detention around the punishment of crimes rather than the coercion of private agreements. The analysis has implications for theories of states, markets, and violence, as well as for recent trends in penal debt, debt resistance, and prison abolition.

The jailhouse divergence: Why debtors’ prisons disappeared in 19th century Europe and flourished in West Africa

“…According to Bruce Mann (2002), volatility in the 19th century US land market led many respectable men to go broke in the early 1800s, at which point indebtedness no longer came to represent one's poor moral character, but rather, bad luck in finance. At the same time, the penitentiary saw incarceration become associated with criminality and danger, a fault which people considered meaningfully different from insolvency (Roehrkasse, 2021). In other words, an idealist school has argued that the abolition of the debtors’ prison rested with changes in social attitudes toward debt.…”

“…As late as 1830—a time when fiery reformists opposed to the debtors’ prison agitated on both sides of the Atlantic—it was estimated that three to five times as many people were imprisoned for debt as for crime in the US states of Massachusetts, Maryland, New York and Pennsylvania (Hope, 2014: 23). In some counties, as many as one debtor prisoner stood for every ten households (Roehrkasse, 2021: 2). In New York City, roughly 10,000 people were incarcerated for debt in 1830 out of a population of less than 150,000 (Hope, 2014: 24).…”