A symbol of Victorian England’s inequitable nature made infamous by Charles Dickens, ... The author of the Obama-era guidance on debtors' prisons, Lisa Foster, ...

We are smug to believe that we are nothing like Victorian England. But debtor’s prisons and poor laws have not disappeared. They have rather developed into modern-day hidden debt laws.

In Victorian England, the poor risked going to debtors prisons. In contemporary America, the poor face a different form of lockup. Its walls are built out of predatory mortgage loans, rent-to-own ...

Victorian England. The debtors’ prisons, made so famous by the novels of Charles Dickens, confined debtors until their debts had been paid. But, behind bars, they were unable to earn any money, and so ...

Dickens was haunted all his life by the shame of his father's sentence, and the menial work he had to do, and told very little about it. Debtors prisons were a constant presence looming over the ...

England's prisons are over-crowded. The Industrial Revolution at the end of the century leads to the displacement of many people and an increase in petty crime. Numbers are swelled by debtors and in ...

In rapidly industrializing Victorian England, rising crime levels (and public fretting over the “criminal classes”) led to a prison construction boom. Between 1842 and 1877, 90 prisons were ...