Abstract
Economic sociologists have documented the rise of financialization, including credit and debt. In the case of monetary sanctions in the criminal legal system, courts frequently extend payment plans—or “layaway”—as a way for defendants to manage financial court debt and gain their freedom. Using 241 hours of courtroom ethnography and 155 interviews with court actors and people paying their court debt in Illinois, the authors offer a microsociology of financialization that shows how the creditor/debtor relationship commodifies freedom, confuses and suffuses court processes, amplifies control, and expands the financial sector into domains that obligate participation. Layaway freedomrepresents a case of coercive financialization, or the externally imposed, involuntary, or last-resort entry into financial engagements. The manipulation of money and time achieves disproportionate punishment that is multiplicative, rather than simply additive, all under the guise of routine financial responsibility. The authors discuss implications of these concepts for both economic and criminal-legal sociology.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 889-930 |
| Number of pages | 42 |
| Journal | American Journal of Sociology |
| Volume | 126 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Jan 2021 |
Funding
1 This research was funded by a grant to the University of Washington from Arnold Ventures (Alexes Harris, principal investigator). Partial support for this research came from a Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development research infrastructure grant (P2C HD042828) to the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at the University of Washington. We thank the faculty and graduate student collaborators of the Multi-State Study of Monetary Sanctions, as well as Bruce Car-ruthers, Wendy Espeland, Roi Livne, and the AJS reviewers, for their contributions to and feedback on this article. Direct correspondence to Mary Pattillo, Northwestern University, Department of Sociology, 1810 Chicago Avenue, Evanston, Illinois 60208. E-mail: [email protected] © 2021 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0002-9602/2021/12604-0004$10.00
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Sociology and Political Science
