Imprisonment for debt

“ Those condemned to imprisonment for debt are shut up in a special compartment, apart from the common run of criminals, but in respect of accommodation and general treatment are in no respect better off than the latter. ”

“ I should be in favour of more stringent measures being taken against the fraudulent debtor, for one meets him every day, well-to-do and smiling, with a bill of sale on his furniture and everything in his wife’s name. But he is the curled darling of the law. He makes use of the law to protect himself and his frauds, and the Debtors Act, which was intended to abolish imprisonment for debt, has no terrors for him, whilst under its provisions hundreds of weekly wage earners are imprisoned. ”

“ He is convinced, of his own experience, that imprisonment for debt does no one any good, neither the man who owes, nor the man who is owed, nor the onlookers who have to contribute to the support of destitute debtors. ”

“ Imprisonment for debt, for reasons previously explained, is such a rare occurrence in the provinces, that there is no house of detention, and a debtor is perforce imprisoned with the accused, convicted, and condemned—the three graduated subdivisions of the class generically styled criminal. ”

“ Much, however, as the prisoners might grieve, it was of no use kicking against an Act of Parliament, and those prisoners who did not take advantage of the Insolvent Debtors Act, were transferred to the Queen's Prison, which in its turn ceased to be a debtor's prison, and was used by Military offenders, until it was sold on Oct. 30, 1879, and pulled down in that and the following year. Now, legally speaking, there is no imprisonment for debt, but people are only committed for Contempt of Court. ”

“ A little over a hundred years ago there were thirty-four offenses in England punishable by capital punishment. To-day there is only one. Charles Dickens did more than any agency toward doing away with imprisonment for debt, yet last year there were no less than eleven thousand prisoners in confinement for debt in English prisons. How many of these have since joined the ranks of the criminals through loss of self-respect? What has been the effect upon their wives and families? Why is a man imprisoned for debt? ”

“ To hold that these humble but necessary public duties can only be undertaken at the hazard of personal liability for every judgment which they fail to levy and collect, whether through mistake, ignorance, inadvertence, or accident, as a sheriff is for an escape, without any proof that the judgment creditor has lost his debt, or that its value is in any manner impaired, is a doctrine too harsh to be enforced in any court where imprisonment for debt has been abolished. ”

“ I want to insist on this point because one of the stumbling blocks in the way of reform to-day is the strange belief, fostered by the tally-man and his friends, that in some mysterious way imprisonment for debt has really been already abolished and that the working classes really go to prison for contempt of court or some other reason. ”

“ In the United States imprisonment for debt was universal under the common law, but it has been abolished in every state, except in certain cases, as where there is any suspicion of fraud or where the debtor has an intention of removing out of the state to avoid his debts. ”

“ This situation is not changed because the sentence provides for a release from the subsidiary imprisonment upon payment of the money wrongfully converted. The sentence imposed, nevertheless, includes the requirement to pay money because of the conviction of the offense. The requirement that there shall be no imprisonment for debt was intended to prevent the resort to that remedy for the collection of contract debts, and not to prevent the state from imposing a sentence for crime which should require the restoration of the sum of money wrongfully converted in violation of a criminal statute. ”

“ Now all this is only possible because of the second factor in our treatment of the insolvent poor, namely, imprisonment for debt. The insolvent rich—if we may use such a phrase—do not nowadays fear imprisonment for debt. At the expense of a few pounds borrowed from a friend, they file their petition in bankruptcy and shake themselves free of all their creditors as if by magic; for not being traders their discharge is of little importance to them, and they go absolutely unpunished. ”

“ The tenth rule of the circuit court, for the district of Ohio, relied on by the defendant in this case, is in these words: 'But under neither mesne nor final process, shall any individual be kept imprisoned, who, under the insolvent law of the state, has, for such demand, been released from imprisonment.'
One in prison only can be released from imprisonment. One who has never been imprisoned on a debt, never can have been released from imprisonment for that debt, though he may have been absolved or released from liability to imprisonment on account of it. ”

“ The Fleet and Ludgate were purely for debtors, in contradistinction to the others, which accommodated not only debtors but criminals. Imprisonment for debt has not very long been done away with—indeed, it now exists under the name of 'contempt of court'; and what renders it more illogical and oppressive, is that people can only be imprisoned for owing small sums, the debtors who operate on a larger scale having perfect immunity from restraint. ”

“ The old method of collecting money fines which compelled the defendant to pay or replevy the same the moment he was fined was always a source of great hardship on the poor. It was unreasonable to expect a common laborer arrested late at night, and convicted in the morning, to be prepared to settle with the State. If he was unable to pay or make arrangements to have his fine staid for the statutory period, he was sent to prison, not because the court had given him a term of imprisonment, but because he was poor, which is in effect imprisonment for debt. ”

“ As I have already pointed out, in America no honest man is likely to get into prison merely for the wickedness of owing money. We cannot say that is true here. In Germany the working man lives on a cash basis. Credit is not largely given, as there is no power of imprisonment for debt. ”

“ The frequency and extent of processes against debtors seventy or eighty years ago will appear almost incredible in an age when insolvent acts and bankruptcy courts do so much to relieve the impecunious, and imprisonment for debt has almost entirely disappeared. ”

“ Yet to-day thousands of debtors go to prison because they have not means to pay their creditors. The difference between killing and imprisoning a debtor is a difference in degree only. The principle is the same. The object of the creditor is, perhaps, in the first place, to get repaid his debt; when he finds this is impossible the death or imprisonment of the debtor merely satisfies his desire for revenge. The ancient Romans were, in one way, a more practical people than ourselves, for they threw the costs of this revenge direct upon the creditor, whereas we throw it upon the taxpayer. ”

“ So much tenderness towards an assassin, and similar proceedings which I have witnessed relative to incendiaries and persons guilty of forgery, recall to mind those times of barbarism, in which criminals were redeemed at a price. It will be readily imagined, after what has been said, that imprisonment for debt is very abhorrent from American ideas ”