The jailhouse divergence: Why debtors’ prisons disappeared in 19th century Europe and flourished in West Africa
| Author | Sarah Balakrishnan |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14624745221081961 |
| Published date | 01 December 2022 |
| Date | 01 December 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue: African Penal Histories in Global Perspective |
The jailhouse divergence:
Why debtors’prisons
disappeared in 19th century
Europe and flourished in
West Africa
Sarah Balakrishnan
University of Minnesota Twin Cities, USA
Abstract
It has been argued that the debtors’prison was abolished in 19th century Europe and
North America because the institution contradicted the principles of modern capitalism;
by confining debtors for unpaid loans, it punished the poor while hampering the cred-
itor, who could not be repaid by a debtor rotting in jail. This essay revises these assump-
tions through a study of debtors’prisons in 19th century Ghana. It argues that, in both
Europe and West Africa, the debtors’prison historically emerged as a hostage-taking
institution. Families paid their members’loans to free them. In 19th century Ghana,
this system proved crucial to the spread of mercantile capitalism; debt inmates were
released within a week and creditors were repaid in full. However, in Euro-America,
a new belief in homo economicus as the ‘self-made man’portrayed insolvency as an indi-
vidual failure. The European nuclear family also reduced the financial base supporting the
debtor. The result was that debtors faced months, if not years, behind bars. This essay
suggests that debtors’prisons disappeared in Europe, while flourishing in West Africa,
not due to the emergence of capitalism, but because of the social fabric of credit
relations—the financial obligations of Africa kin networks versus European families.
Keywords
Prison, debt, debtors’prison, capitalism, Africa, Europe, ransom, hostage, abolition,
credit
Corresponding author:
Sarah Balakrishnan, History, University of Minnesota Twin Cities, 271 19th Ave S, Minneapolis, MN, USA.
Email: sbalakri@umn.edu
Special Issue: African Penal Histories in Global Perspective
Punishment & Society
2022, Vol. 24(5) 807–823
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14624745221081961
journals.sagepub.com/home/pun
Arising around the 1820s and continuing through British colonial rule from 1873 to
1957, the institutions that Europeans called ‘native prisons’wereadefining feature of
commercial and social life on the Gold Coast (today’s southern Ghana). They were
used to resolve all manners of disputes, from theft to credit to assault to adultery
(Braatz, 2015). In this article, I would like to focus on the charge most commonly
seen in the prison—that of debt. Specifically, I am interested in the transformations
to credit relationships that consolidated a debtors’prison system in 19th century
Ghana, the same era in which these institutions were abolished in most of Europe
and North America. I would like to ask what the West African prisons tell us about
the relationship between capitalism, kinship and confinement in this time period,
and why imprisonment for debt ended in some parts of the world while it flourished
in others.
In the still-limited literature on prisons in the Global South, no study that I am aware
of has analyzed the history of debtors’prisons. This paucity owes predominantly to the
myth only slowly being eroded in penal studies today that there were no prisons in
places like Africa before colonial rule. The earliest studies on African prisons, which
developed in the early 2000s, put forth the thesis that prisons were a predominantly
European invention (Bernault, 2003: 2; Saleh-Hanna and Ume, 2008: 57), and that
Africa’sfirst prisons were the colonial penitentiary—a European import transplanted
into the colony for the purpose of political domination and labor exploitation
(Konaté, 2003: 155–156; Branch, 2007: 241). Though important studies have since
emphasized how African penal practices shaped the colonial prison’s operations, the
field has still largely focused on the colonial penitentiary, not earlier institutions or
methods of confinement.
To no small degree, the penitentiary’s conceptual isolation from other types of carceral
practices owes to the histories written of Europe and North America. Although both
Britain and the United States held dozens of debtors’prisons in the 19th century, these
sites were considered archaic places even at the time. According to John Stuart Mill,
the debtors’prison was a ‘barbarous expedien[t] of a rude age’(1891: 585). Having
existed in England through the middle ages (its first surviving legislation dating to the
1280s), 19th century moral reformers branded the debtors’prison a ‘survival’of medieval
‘barbarism’, an institution totally incongruous with the modern era.
The perception that debtors’prisons simply ‘survived’for far longer than their
economic use or moral license has prevented substantial study of debtors’prisons
until only recently. New monographs by both Tawny Paul (2019) and Alexander
Wakelam (2020) have led to fresh insights about this prison’s role in the growth
of modern capitalism, and its effect upon social and class relations. To this, a
West African vantage may prove useful. Having developed from a similar pre-
history to Europe of pawnage, hostage-holding and monetary shortage, West
African debtors’prisons predominantly dealt with middle class borrowers, just
like in Britain and the United States. However, unlike in the latter nations, capitalist
relations did not eventually demand the abolition of the debtors’prison. To the con-
trary, debtors’prisons proved so important to the Gold Coast economy that British
colonizers in the late 19th century decided not to ban them. This was in spite of the
808 Punishment & Society 24(5)
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