Yet debt has never been just debt: Its power comes from the fact that it can impose upon its bearers not just limitation, but shame (at least so long as those bearers are individuals, rather than corporate or political entities.) Biographer John Forster recalled Charles Dickens telling him that “the last words said to him by his father before he was finally carried to the Marshalsea, were to the effect that the sun was set upon him for ever.” Remembering these words, Charles said to Forster: “I really believed at the time that they had broken my heart.”

Today, debt plays a near-constant role in American life: We are both a nation in debt and a nation of debtors, and so, to an extent, a nation that functions as a kind of large-scale debtor’s prison. Perhaps nowhere is this reality more visible than in the way the American legal system has been able to turn debt into a kind of blunt instrument. A citizen’s debt will reliably generate more debt, which will, in turn, generate a reliable profit for local law enforcement, or from the private companies that get in on the action…

The debtor’s prison as discrete location may no longer exist as we once knew it, but this is only because our ability to punish debtors has now spread beyond prison walls. In Tom Barrett — and the countless other citizens like him — we find the story of a citizen not just controlled by debt, but forced to finance his own incarceration.