Neoliberalism, mass incarceration, and the US debt–criminal justice complex
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While debtors’ prisons in the United States were outlawed in the early 19th century, recent reports indicate that a growing number of people across the US are currently imprisoned for debt. This process typically occurs in two ways: debtors are found in contempt of court for non-appearance after being pressured into repaying consumer debt, or offenders are incarcerated for unpaid legal financial obligations (LFOs) incurred in the criminal justice system. While numerous legal scholars have examined these practices, little scholarship has situated this phenomenon within the politico-economic landscape of neoliberalism. Seeking to chart the intersections between economic restructuring and the expansion of the carceral state over the past 40 years, this article situates the modern debt–criminal justice complex within the broader historical trajectories of debt, incarceration, and institutional racism within the US. Emphasizing the centrality of US state reforms implemented under neoliberalism, this article examines the transformation of the federal welfare system toward ‘workfare’, as well as bankruptcy reforms implemented in the context of rising consumer debt during the 1990s and early 2000s. I maintain that these overlapping transformations, alongside the expansion of the criminal justice apparatus, were central historical processes that shaped the modern debt–criminal justice complex in the US, which continues to criminalize low-income and racialized populations across the country.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it