The New American Debtors' Prisons

Abstract

Debtors’ prisons are back, in the form of imprisonment for nonpayment of criminal fines, fees, and costs. While the new debtors’ prisons are not historically or doctrinally continuous with the old, recent developments in criminal law suggest that some parts of them offend the same functional and moral principles that compelled the abolition of the old debtors’ prisons. Legal actors may therefore plausibly interpret the constitutional and statutory texts that abolished the old debtors’ prisons to constitute checks on the new — or a new abolitionist movement might deploy new constitutional texts. While the criminal law literature is starting to grapple with the question of debtors’ prisons, this piece engages with the metaphor head-on and asks how the old ban on debtors’ prisons should be reinterpreted for a new era of mass incarceration.