Debt In The Victorian Era

Superior Essays
Committing the crime of debt in the Victorian era was considered no less of a crime than that of murder and while you could not be executed for the crime of debt, the use of torture devices was known to have killed countless inmates. Debtors were imprisoned indefinitely or until their debt was paid and unless you had the means to pay the debt off, it was possible to spend your life imprisoned. Death was more plausible than release.
While debtors’ prisons were thought to have been abolished in the 19th century, there is a new modern phenomenon of imprisonment in America today and although they no longer involve corporal punishment, modern-day debtors’ prisons do exist and continue to be growing concern.
The History of the Marshalsea Prison:
The
…show more content…
According to article “Why Motive Matters: Designing Effetive Policy Responses to Modern Day Debtors’ Prisons,” a harsh and critical civil rights report prepared by the United States Department of Justice prompted a deeper analysis both locally and nationally, of city’s municipal courts, uncovering modern-day debtors’ prisons. What was once considered immoral in the Victorian era has surfaced right here in our backyard. The goals of the city courts are to maximize its revenue generation. This has led to lawsuits being filed and the United States Supreme Court continually criticizing the policies taking place that allow for this atrocity.
According to Marsh and Gerrick, debts occurred as a result of a criminal offense breaks down into two components. First is the fine, which is the sanction for the offense. Second are the “user-fees” which are costs incurred during the prosecution process. The “user-fees” typically end up costing more than the actual fine. The inability to pay these fines and additional costs can be converted into jail

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    In the article “Assessing the penal harm movement” by Francis T. Cullen, Cullen talks about the penal harm movement and the unintended consequences that arose from the utilization of this movement. He reviews the evolution of punishments throughout time and the distinctions of the correction system in each historical era. He also argues that the penal harm movement has caused and still continues to cause society further complications. Cullen believes that we as a society needs to keep fighting towards finding a more efficacious and progressive response to crime. Cullen states, “For over a decade, virtually every contemporary commentary on corrections in the United States has reminded us that the system is in crisis” (57).…

    • 678 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In Clinton Correctional Facility (a maximum security prison) in New York, two inmates escaped. On June 6th of 2015, inmates Richard Matt and David Sweat were reported to have escaped the prison. After twenty three days Sweat was captured and in the custody of FBI, his other fellow inmate Matt was shot and killed by authorities. The investigation of the escapees showed underlying problems and corrections in the facilities itself. Corruption such as; heroin dealing from inmates to inmates, relationships between inmates and the guards, and lastly the reason for such a security lapse allowing for the convicts to escape.…

    • 767 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Richard Nixon’s law and order discourse laid the groundwork for mass incarceration, though the tangible public policy began in 1982 with Ronald Regan’s War On Drugs. The movement was political plea, intended to garner white working class conservative support by playing into racial fears. And it had devastating results. From 1982 to the present the “U.S. penal system exploded, from around 300,000 [inmates] to more than 2 million… with drug convictions accounting for the majority of the increase” and young black men accounting for a hugely disproportionate number of those convicted (Alexander, pg. 6). The criminal justice system plays a large role in mass incarceration, but mass incarceration encompasses something much broader and more sinister - the framework of laws, rules, policies and customs that control “those labeled criminals” in and out of formal control in prisons (Alexander, pg. ).…

    • 1100 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    INDIANA SENTENCING REFORM: TWO YEARS AND STILL NOT WORKING In an article I published this past January (“State Sentencing Reform: Reducing Recidivism OR Costing Indiana Counties More Money?”), I argued that the new sentencing reform bill, which radically changes the way criminal courts sentence offenders, could actually cost local communities more money without doing much to prevent recidivism. Under the new guidelines, offenders sentenced to a year or less in criminal court would not see a state prison. Instead, they would carry out their sentences in the communities in which they were convicted. If offenders had to serve jail time, county lock-ups would serve as their prisons.…

    • 997 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Prison Population: The growing business “They speak about school system being used to feed young people into youth detention, jails, and prisons where those bodies are suddenly worth a fortune. People say that the criminal justice system does not work” (Bonnie Kerness). America has captured and controlled the population by putting our people in prisons while private prison companies like Corrections Corporations of America and The GEO group celebrate the fact that they gain more money as the rate of incarcerated raises and according to Online paralegal degree, “2.3 million people living behind bars in the United States, ”. Moreover this affects mainly people who are economically disadvantaged. According to the book “Race to Incarcerate” by Marc Mauer, Mauer argues that America has used prison to punish the people and a racial disparity in our justice system is happening.…

    • 2271 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Provided this information Texans must ask themselves when a publicly-traded company, accountable to its stockholders and driven by profits, earns profits through the housing of prisoners, what motivation exists for rehabilitation and the possibility of early release as a reward for good behavior? The prison-industrial complex is not only a set of interest groups and institutions. It is also a state of mind. The lure of big money is corrupting the nation's criminal-justice system, replacing notions of public service with a drive for higher profits. The eagerness of elected officials to pass "tough-on-crime" legislation—combined with their unwillingness to disclose the true costs of these laws—has encouraged all sorts of financial improprieties.…

    • 1395 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Did you know the United States is home to five percent of the world’s population, with twenty-five percent of the world’s prisoners and ninety percent of those prisoners being non-violent offenders? According to Us News & World Report the prison population has grown by eight hundred percent since the 1980’s while the country’s population only increased by a third. With this cancerous growth of the incarceration rate in America, the question is how far will this problem go, and how much will the American citizen have to pay before they realize the current justice system is obsolete. With an outdated system of justice and a spiraling incarceration rate, the question on most people’s mind is should the justice system be reformed? The main question on a lot of people’s mind is how the justice system get so jacked up.…

    • 827 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Private Prison Case Study

    • 1209 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Private prisons lobby for harsh criminal laws to increase profit at the cost of inmates’ wellbeing. In 1998 election cycle, private prisons contributed $540,000 to 361 politicians (Anderson, 2009). Bribes were also used as method to encourage private prisons. In 2009, two Pennsylvania judges received $2.6 million to oppose alternative and lenient sentences for juveniles (Anderson, 2009) Incarceration negatively affects recidivism rates (Anderson, 2009).…

    • 1209 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Kamau Franklin (2015) an activist, attorney, and director of American Service committee, in her article in “From Slavery to Mass Incarnation” asserted that “Our criminal justice system isn’t broken. This glaring racial inequity is actually a result of how the justice system was designed to work—a system with an undeniable historic connection to slavery that was outlawed a century and a half ago” (para 2). The prison system has become a business, and the target groups are people of color, where they’re labeled as criminals by multiple generations through institutions such as slavery and Jim Crow. The United States incarcerates more of its citizens than any other nation in the world (para 1). All of this created a cycle of mass incarcerations and slavery in its newest form.…

    • 1962 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Golden Gulag Analysis

    • 776 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Golden Gulag 1. How does the text circulate? The material analyzed by Ruth Wilson Gilmore circulates in the form of a book that was originally published on December 9, 2006. The author’s intended audience consists of individuals who have been directly or indirectly affected by any form of social racism and in particular those individuals who continue to fight for human rights.…

    • 776 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Crime Control As Industry warns us about the wicked growth of the US imprisonment levels, and the threats that this trend can have around the world if it continues to develop. A good way of stopping this from happening is to have a deeper look into the way the penal systems work and in particular to highlight the differences between political processes and…

    • 954 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    2.2 million men, women, and youth are incarcerated in the United States right now (The Sentencing Project). The U.S. accounts for 5% of the world’s population, yet 22% of the world’s imprisoned population (Mass Incarceration). Mass incarceration has reached an increase of over 500% within the last 40 years (The Sentencing Project). Not only are more people being carelessly thrown into jails and prisons, but the number of people that are being released is less and not nearly equal to the number of inmates coming in because people are also being sentenced to longer terms. The $12.5 billion given to states with the 1994 Crime Bill “required inmates to serve at least 85 percent of their sentences” which is in part why sentences are longer served in the justice system (Brooke Eisen, Chettiar).…

    • 1108 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    With recent talks on Capitol Hill of an upcoming criminal justice reform, it is not surprising to see topics on sentencing structure, police ethics and practices, and the future of the criminal justice system in the news headlines. One of the biggest topics is the overwhelming prison population in state and federal prisons. This has been a prominent topic for some time now. While some want to curtail the prison community others seem to think there is not a visible complication. Those who sense the prison population or the amount of people under supervision of the criminal justice system is of no concern, more than likely do not understand the impact the population has on criminal justice professionals or where the funding for these institutions…

    • 775 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Downfall of Private Prisons The privatization of jails and prisons in the United States are becoming more and more popular with 122 adult prisons and 252 juvenile facilities, capable of holding more than 160,000 inmates for the past 8 years. These facilities have pros and cons however, 32 states contract with private sector prisons and almost 17 percent of adult inmates are held in private prisons. (Allen, Latessa, and Ponder)…

    • 507 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    For Profit Prison Essay

    • 1120 Words
    • 5 Pages

    The Problem with For-Profit Prison Private or for profit prisons are facilities that are contracted with the local, state or federal government to operate correctional facilities. In the 1980’s President Reagan said that government was the problem and proposed privatizing many institutions (Selman & Leighton, 2010). According to the American Civil Liberties Union, currently about 6% of state prisoners and 16% of federal inmates are in a privatized institutions. The most common argument in favor of for-profit prisons is that private industry is far more efficient than government and thus can operate facilities more more cheaply than the government.…

    • 1120 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays