Mortgaging the Body: Capitalism, the Penitentiary, and the Decline of Debt Imprisonment

James Parisot, The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

This project asks: how did incarcerating criminalized people in penitentiaries become a primary means of punishing deviance in American society? It explores the history of this process through three lenses: 1) the development of capitalism, 2) the invention of the penitentiary, and 3) the decline of debt imprisonment. In the context of contemporary debates over police and prison reform/abolition, this study explores the role of the penitentiary in capitalist society through the lens of the decline of debt incarceration. For much of American history, failure to repay debt was often the most common reason a person might find themselves locked up as a criminal. But through the early to mid-1800s, this process gradually declined. At the same time, the penitentiary was born, as systems of punishment transformed from public humiliation and torture to an attempt to ‘correct’ criminal behavior by reforming the deviant incarcerated subject. Alongside this, during this era, insolvency and bankruptcy laws were slowly discussed and created, primarily on a state-by-state basis, save for several short-lived federal experiments. The study tells this story by drawing from a wide-ranging array of primary sources from prison reports, to pamphlets and books, to records of prison reform societies, to news articles, to government records, and beyond.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 170. Critical Perspectives on US History