Prisons of Debt

"Prisons of Debt is an absolutely compelling and tragic account of how the child support and criminal legal systems jointly produce mass indebtedness among the most disadvantaged fathers, thereby exacerbating the problems they are supposed to solve. Lynne Haney's astute ethnographic observations, and her gripping in-depth interviews with fathers caught up in these intersecting systems, dismantle the 'deadbeat dad' trope, echoed in media and in court, to reveal the exceptionally high cost of our current child support policies for children, families, and society."—Mona Lynch, author of Hard Bargains: The Coercive Power of Drug Laws in Federal Court

"In Haney's beautifully written Prisons of Debt, we learn what the merger of the criminal legal and child support systems has wrought for formerly incarcerated parents, especially low-income fathers of color, who bear the brunt of the dual systems' mutually reinforcing modes of surveillance and control. Punitive state policies both deny indebted parents' financial citizenship and deprive them of their liberty. The result: it is near impossible to resolve their ever-accumulating debt; it is also extremely difficult to contribute to their children's lives in satisfying and meaningful ways. It is a system that produces few, if any, winners: fathers struggle mightily to show up for their children; mothers continue to raise their children with meager support; and their children fail to get the resources and protections they need and deserve to survive and thrive. Prisons of Debt is a compelling and devastating account and a must-read for students of punishment and beyond."—Sandra Susan Smith, Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice and Faculty Chair for the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management at the Harvard Kennedy School

"This is a book of immense importance about the criminalization of poverty. Throwing poor people into debtors' prisons for their inability to pay child support is unconscionable, but as Haney tells us in this timely, pressing book, all too common."—Stephen Bright, Yale Law School,​ and former Director, Southern Center for Human Rights​

"This is an important book, extremely well researched, documented, illustrated, and argued. It provides a deep and thorough understanding of poverty governance and the mechanisms by which inequality is institutionally organized and reproduced. The ethnography and interviews are expertly woven through the text to provide rich, and at times dramatic, testimonies of the institutional processes central to the book."—Timothy Black, coauthor of It's a Setup: Fathering from the Social and Economic Margins

"An incredibly important book, both with respect to its rigor and multilayered analysis and the importance of its findings. Prisons of Debt successfully shows how child support orders are core to understanding the long reach or aftermath of mass incarceration experiences."—Sara Wakefield, coauthor of Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality