Modern-Day Debtors’ Prisons and Debt in Antiquity
Photo by Zak Greant | CC BY 2.0
Paul Sliker: So Michael, in conjunction with Harvard University’s Peabody Museum you headed up an archaeological research team on the origins of private property, debt, and real estate and the origins of economic civilization in the ancient Near East. You actually have a new book coming out in May called ‘…and forgive them their debts: Credit and Redemption From Bronze Age Debt Remissions to the Jubilee Year’. And speaking of debt that’s a perfect segue into the topic of our first discussion here. A new ACLU report just got released called A Pound of Flesh: The Criminalization of Private Debt, that shows that thousands of debtors are arrested in jail each year in the U.S. because they owe money–and millions more are threatened with jail. The debts can be as small as a few dollars and can involve every kind of consumer debt from medical bills to car payments to student loans to credit card debt.
It goes sort of something like this… cities and private collections agencies have teamed up to bring back a system of modern day debtors’ prisons to skirt around federal law that has prohibited debtors’ prisons since 1833. And it’s also in clear violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. And these agencies and their hired lawyers will send out a notice to someone who’s missed a payment. That person won’t show up to court. They get a notice of contempt and then it goes on their record and an arrest warrant is issued for their failure to appear in court. And this takes some pretty big cooperation or coordination with the prosecutors and the judge. One of the most alarming things is that there’s sort of a business relationship or a quid pro quo between collection agencies and the prosecutors.
So my question for you Michael is, as an economist and someone who is an expert on the history of debt, can you give us your reaction to this report?
Michael Hudson: Well I think much of the modern variable is the privatization of prisons. If you have a privatization of prisons, you run them for profit. And what do you need in order to run the prison for profit? Well, you need inmates. So the first question is how are you going to get inmates. And that’s what brings us back to the issue of debt.
So far for the last 20 or 30 years most of the inmates have been racial minorities on drug deals…marijuana and other drug deals putting them in. But now that’s being phased out because they realize how destructive and racist it is. So they want an equal opportunity source of inmates and debt is a major source of the inmates to be employed to make a profit. Now in a way this goes back to the very origins of debt.
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