Today the phrase “debtors’ prison” is often invoked to describe this experience of punitive indebtedness. Sometimes it is meant literally. Consider Melissa Welch-Latronica, a thirty-year-old single mother, who in February was wrenched from her minivan and thrown into a jail cell in Porter County, Illinois, over failure to pay an ambulance bill. Her story is unusual but not unique. A 2018 ACLU report documented a thousand cases of the “criminalization of private debt” and compiled a dozen of the most extreme stories. Most of the people featured ended up in jail because they failed to appear in court over unpaid debts, resulting in a warrant. And then there is the abominable, systemic cycle of incarceration and reincarceration of poor people—and particularly poor people of color—unable to pay fines and court fees.
Still, the debtors’ prison as such—a prison specifically for the detention of those unable to pay their private debts—is long gone. The more common experience resembles that of the California principal: punitive collection takes the form of liens, garnishments, and foreclosures. For most, the story ends not in detention but in default and bankruptcy—possibly homelessness, or impossible choices between food, shelter, medicine, and payment.
The abolition of the debtors’ prison figures in a larger evolution of debt in America. Moral laws derive their power from a sense of natural order. But in moments of crisis, when insolvency has become the norm, the morality and mathematics of debt have proven fungible, susceptible to thoroughgoing change. We may look to this history for hints of how the moral calculus of debt might be poised once more for transformation—and for confirmation that what appears as common sense today could be deemed cruel and unusual tomorrow.
That the meaning of debt can change radically is evident from the changes it has already undergone, even before it reached North America. Debt didn't always suggest collection agencies and APRs; the earliest evidence of credit relations, dating to Sumerian city states around 5,000 years ago, signified something quite different. In his sweeping history Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), the anthropologist David Graeber suggests that cohesion in the earliest societies would have grown out of a sense of divine, unpayable indebtedness and an expectation of mutual reciprocity. For most of human history, this was the kind of indebtedness most people would have recognized: an “everyday communism,” Graeber calls it, of collective stewardship and interdependence without end.
Graeber’s central claim is that the rigid state apparatus for the regulation of indebtedness—the development of state-sanctioned money, a regime of quantified exchange, and punishment of nonpayment—had to be created, predicated on the fungibility of debt. And for Graeber, an anarchist, it can just as well be dismantled. Contemporary debt’s moral foundations—the idea that failure to pay a debt is a profound misdeed or moral failing, and that a creditor’s entitlement to repayment with interest trumps all other obligations—are just as historically contingent as the coercive institutions they support. With the global movement of slavers under a mercantile, imperialist paradigm, Graeber contends, the borders of communities contracted to surround individual bodies or familial units; the currency-based trading that had long taken place at the edges of society came to dominate exchange within it. At a certain point in history, almost everyone became a stranger.