Debtors’ prisons: Dickensian horrors or economic successes? | HistoryExtra
"'Prisons hold different types of people. Some are purely debtors' prisons. Some are purely prisons for felons. But it's worth noting that in the 18th century, the justice system was only starting to really use imprisonment as a punishment. Most people, if they're found guilty of a crime, are punished by whipping, they are sentenced to death or they're transported. So the majority of people who have committed a crime who are in a prison of any kind are usually awaiting trial or awaiting punishment. So the kinds of people who spend extended periods of time in prison are debtors. So you wouldn't necessarily be housed next door to a person who's been convicted of murder, but you would likely be held in the same institution. But they would be kept separately usually. In fact, there are complaints occasionally from prisons on periods of overcrowding that debtors are being housed too close to felons but if there was an example say of a murderer being kept in the room of a debtor, there would've been a city inquiry probably into how on earth this could have happened. Because our association with prisons is people who are in them are found to have done wrong. But debtors weren't being punished for being in debt, they were placed in prison to compel them to make their payments. So most people would never have seen the felons who were in prison...
Today when we talk about credit we generally think about um financial institutions and we think about banks and we think about loans with defined terms. Credit in the 18th century, there are loans, there are developing banking institutions but the majority of credit refers to purchases that people make on an everyday basis. So there's, the currency at this time is still based on silver and gold and there's just simply not enough current, that silver and gold currency to meet the demands either of the speed of commerce which is increasing significantly from the late 17th century or the needs of inflation. Also not all money is very trustworthy. There's a lot of coin clipping going on and counterfeiting. So potentially the physical money in your pocket might not necessarily be worth what it claims to be. So most people buy their goods on an informal system of credit and this is used for almost everything. So whether you're going to the pub at the end of the day to buy a pint you probably get that on credit, whether you're going to buy a new watch, you probably get that on credit. The watchmaker probably bought their supplies on credit and they may even have paid their, the wages to the people who made, did the fiddly work for them on credit as well. And in that system of credit, it's not necessarily about how much money you actually have.
So Credit in the 18th century is intensely tied up with contemporary understandings of reputation. So if you're a good member of your community, if you help out widows, if you go to church every week. Um if you are known to be honest or if you have a particular social rank then you have a better credit rating than someone who might have a lot of cash but is publicly drunk um and doesn't take care of their family in public. So it's a system that's very much in operation from the late 16th into the 19th century and developed out of a small tight-knit rural communities. But in the 18th century when you've got urban environments a lot of that credit is moving at a much higher pace and it's a lot more subjective but that still doesn't mean that you necessarily have a contract when you're buying things. Most agreements are on oath, they're an oral agreement usually just somebody agrees to pay the sum when demanded. So you don't necessarily stake anything when you're buying. Um, nor do you necessarily, um make a specific agreement about when you're going to pay it and under what terms.
So usually people are in debtors’ prisons not because they can't pay but because their creditor believes they can pay and they haven't yet paid. Um so you, the reason you might have somebody who theoretically is quite wealthy in debtors’ prisons is because they might potentially not have a lot of cash on hand. Um their wealth might be stored up in the things that they own. Um in the um money that they've lent to other people themselves. Their money is tied up in things that are not easily transferred to creditors.
Also, people, if you don't have a specific arrangement of you must pay by September, people have different expectations about when they actually might want to make payments. Uh you might need that money for something else at a different rate that you think is more important than paying your watchmaker. So people, people don't, people who might be wealthy might not necessarily have a lot of cash on hand with which they can pay debts, that they are, that they owe and so when a creditor comes calling they might be wealthy but unable to actually make that demand. And so those people might end up in debtors’ prisons not necessarily because they're impoverished but simply because they either lack cash or they didn't really feel like they needed to pay that creditor. If you've got friends you owe money to or a business you want to invest in you might more likely to put your money towards that than a watchmaker who you can probably blag off for a few more weeks...
Most people in the 18th century are profoundly illiquid um not just because there's not enough cash flowing around but because of this ubiquity of credit... most people are both creditors and debtors at the same time... 90% leave the prison within a year which is very different to our kind of Dickensian assumption of people being locked up... if you have a debtor who is completely impoverished, that everything's gone wrong in their life, it's not really worth your time imprisoning that person um and you'd probably just kind of write off that debt as unrecoverable... one of the responses to debt imprisonment is to go okay I need to raise this amount of money how am I going to do that as quickly as possible and that includes using money you might have put to other purposes, selling goods and calling in favors from friends and actually also imprisoning your own debtors... it's worth thinking of the debtors prison as a tool of contract enforcement rather than a place of punishment... there's actually a system whereby if you want to you can pay an extra fee to The Keeper of the prison to live outside the prison walls um within a defined area'...
‘If you're a lower middle class person who probably can't afford to travel into Westminster to buy a brand new tailored uh outfit maybe pop into the local debtors prison and see if there is somebody who's willing to do it on the cheap. Or if you need cheap legal advice pop into a debtors’ prison they'll definitely be a lawyer there who can help you out. As long as as long as you don't need representation in court you can you'll be perfectly fine to help you’...
‘The majority of people who end up in debtors prison are placed there by creditors who secure a specific writ in which you have to go to a Justice of the Peace, you swear to the existence of the debt. You might provide evidence but it's not usually a requirement and then you pay the courts’ costs usually of about a shilling. After that a writ is issued and handed to a bailiff. And then the bailiff goes out hunting for you. Bailiffs can seize anyone in the streets except on Sundays. Uh on Sundays you're safe. And bailiffs can't enter people's homes but you can be out anywhere and be captured by a bailiff. There's an there's an actress and comedian called Mary Wells who in her autobiography describes a time she’s sent to prison while she's at the theater. She's gone to see her friend’s play which ironically was called how to grow rich. I don't know if that was, she was looking for inspiration but she was sat in her box and a man came and sat next to her and quietly informed her that she was under arrest but he was happy to let her watch the rest of the play first... it's a really easy system there's no trial you can sue people for debts in court but that involves a trial, it's expensive and a lengthy proceeding. Whereas you can have people arrested very quickly and at minimal expense. Which is one of the reasons why it's so popular with creditors across the period. This is, this is very much a user-driven system. We kind of think of debtors’ debt imprisonment as something which happens to people whereas really we should think of it as something which is done to people by other people...
This is one of the things that prison reformers at the time and subsequent um scholarship that has looked at debtors’ prisons has found uh most ridiculous. Which is that debt imprisonment is predominantly paid for by the debtors themselves... Generally people have to pay a fee when they're committed and they have to pay a fee when they leave. Usually the commitment fee might not be paid at commitment because people might not have cash on hand but that'll be added to your eventual bill so there are instances of people who would be technically released by their creditors but still in prison because they owe money to the prison itself.
But there are other ways in which the keepers raise money. So they're in each prison, there will be rooms that are free and they're usually called the common side or the common ward. These are the most unpleasant parts of debtors’ prisons. They're usually just a big room full of bunk beds or hammocks or just plain boards with straw on them on which people sleep and mixed together. But if you can afford to pay a weekly rent then you can have a private room to yourself or shared with another individual. And these rents are probably, by my estimation, they're at or below the market rate outside of the prison, so they're not necessarily extortionate in compared to what you might pay outside the prison. But they are if you're, if you're thinking about people who are simply there because they theoretically don't have enough money to pay their way.
Also prisons usually have pubs in them. Uh sometimes these are run by prisoners. Um there's a in fact at the Marshall Sea in the 1720s, um, there's a coffee house / pub that's run by a prisoner and it seems that she makes a huge amount of money from other prisoners, uh because they're, she's the only source of of, um prepared hot meals, uh alcohol and coffee. But in most prisons they're run by the prison keeper or the prison keeper's wife or one of the prison officials wives. And again these are, can be quite cheap places to drink. There is evidence that people come in to use the pubs in debtors’ prisons because they're cheaper than pubs outside the debtors’ prisons’...
There are very few countries that breach the UN statement on Banning imprisonment for debt. I think Palestine is the only place where they they still have a debtors’ prison system"
