Debt To Society

It is commonplace to say that criminals pay their debt to society by spending time in prison, but what is a “debt to society”? How is crime understood as a debt? How has time become the equivalent for crime? And how does criminal debt relate to the kind of debt held by consumers and university students? In Debt to Society, Miranda Joseph explores modes of accounting as they are used to create, sustain, or transform social relations. Envisioning accounting broadly to include financial accounting, managerial accounting of costs and performance, and the calculation of “debts to society” owed by criminals, Joseph argues that accounting technologies have a powerful effect on social dynamics by attributing credits and debts. From sovereign bonds and securitized credit card debt to student debt and mortgages, there is no doubt that debt and accounting structure our lives. Exploring central components of neoliberalism (and neoliberalism in crisis) from incarceration to personal finance and university management, Debt to Society exposes the uneven distribution of accountability within our society. Joseph demonstrates how ubiquitous the forces of accounting have become in shaping all aspects of our lives, proposing that we appropriate accounting and offer alternative accounts to turn the present toward a more widely shared well-being.

A Debt of Society is about a man who believes life has been unfair to him and he deserves to even the score anyway he deems to fit. John decides to teach the world a lesson until he is satisfied that his debt is paid in full.

Benefits overpayments and the criminalisation of female poverty -- The local austere creditor -- Criminal justice debt & the return of debtors' prisons -- Student debt in the United States: racial disparities and wealth -- Reducing the burden of student loan repayment: a Canada-US comparison.

Within the last decade, scholars and practitioners alike have noted a surge in the use of legal financial obligations (LFOs) in criminal justice processing. These include fines, fees, and costs that are applied to defendants' cases from "upstream" agencies such as police departments to "downstream" agencies including jails, prisons, probation and parole agencies, and treatment centers. Legal financial obligations can be large, and the result is that outstanding balances often accumulate into unwieldy amounts of criminal justice debt. Recently, a small handful of qualitative studies have shown that these LFOs and debts can have adverse impacts on returning prisoners and their families, including increased stress, strained family relationships, worsened depression, and longer periods spent under criminal justice surveillance for those too poor to pay off outstanding balances. In addition, some of this work suggests that these financial obligations can increase the likelihood of returning to crime. This dissertation expands on the major contributions of these recent qualitative works by addressing the lack of quantitative research in this area. Toward this end, longitudinal data from the Returning Home Study (n=740) and structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques are used to test whether LFOs and debt indeed have adverse impacts on key outcomes of interest in reentry research, including family relationships, depression, justice involvement/entanglement, and recidivism. Findings reveal partial support for past research and theory. Legal financial obligations do not appear to have impacts on depression, family conflict, and several measures of recidivism on average. However, outstanding debt owed to community supervision agencies (i.e., probation/parole/mandatory community supervision) significantly increases the likelihood of remaining under supervision, which, in turn, increases the likelihood of returning to prison. Implications for decision-making bodies from state legislatures to corrections agencies are discussed.

An epic journey through the economies of ancient civilizations, and how they managed debt versus social instability. Shocking historical truths about how debt played a central role in shaping (or destroying) ancient societies (viz: Rome), and that the Bible is preoccupied with debt, not sin, which has been disturbingly inverted in modern times.

A debt crisis occurs when a government, organization, or individual accumulates an unsustainable amount of debt that they are unable to repay. This can have significant negative effects on society. Firstly, a debt crisis can lead to economic instability and recession, which can cause unemployment, business closures, and decreased consumer confidence. This can lead to a decrease in the standard of living for individuals and families, as well as reduced economic growth. Secondly, a debt crisis can lead to government spending cuts and austerity measures, which can negatively impact social programs and public services such as healthcare, education, and social security. This can disproportionately affect vulnerable populations such as the elderly, disabled, and low-income individuals and families. Thirdly, a debt crisis can lead to a loss of investor confidence in the affected government or organization, which can lead to higher borrowing costs, reduced access to credit, and a decreased ability to invest in infrastructure and public goods. Overall, a debt crisis can have far-reaching and long-lasting effects on society, and it is important for governments, organizations, and individuals to manage their debts responsibly to avoid such crises.

Over the course of the last ten years the issue of debt has become a serious problem that threatens to destroy the global socio-economic system and ruin the everyday lives of millions of people. This collection brings together a range of perspectives of key thinkers on debt to provide a sociological analysis focused upon the social, political, economic, and cultural meanings of indebtedness. The contributors to the book consider both the lived experience of debt and the more abstract processes of financialisation taking place globally. Showing how debt functions on the level of both macro- and microeconomics, the book also provides a more holistic perspective, with accounts that span sociological, cultural, and economic forms of analysis.

This a review essay of Debt to Society by Miranda Joseph.The essay connects Miranda Joseph's book Debt to Society to concerns within heterodox economics. It is suggested that it is most adequate to see debt as a process, and especially as a debt-credit process. The paper makes this argument in light of the development of economics into a mainstream and heterodox economics, and efforts to analyze "the social"

South Africa was one of the first countries in the Global South that established a financialized consumer credit market. This market consolidates rather than alleviates the extreme social inequality within a country. This book investigates the political reasons for adopting an allegedly self-regulating market despite its disastrous effects and identifies the colonialist ideas of property rights as a mainstay of the existing social order. The book addresses sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists and legal scholars interested in the interaction of economy and law in contemporary market societies.