Market development, state formation, and the historical abolition of the debtors' prison
PUNISHMENT & SOCIETY-INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PENOLOGY(2023)
摘要
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.
更多查看译文
关键词
Incarceration,debt,morality,capitalism,state formation
AI 理解论文
溯源树
样例
生成溯源树,研究论文发展脉络
Chat Paper
正在生成论文摘要