A debtors' prison is a prison for people who are unable to pay debt. Until the mid-19th century, debtors' prisons were a common way to deal with unpaid debt in Western Europe. Destitute people who were unable to pay a court-ordered judgment would be incarcerated in these prisons until they had worked off their debt via labour or secured outside funds to pay the balance. The product of their labour went towards both the costs of their incarceration and their accrued debt. Increasing access and lenience throughout the history of bankruptcy law have made prison terms for unaggravated indigence obsolete over most of the world.
The 18th-century debtors' prison at the Castellania in Valletta, now the offices of the Health Ministry in Malta
Schuldturm in Nuremberg
A mid-Victorian depiction of the debtors' prison at St Briavels Castle.
The Ancient South Gate and the Prison, Exeter by Thomas Burnett Worth circa 1880. The work depicts the South Gate in Exeter and the city prison which was demolished in 1819. A man under the archway, dressed in green coat and top hat, places something into a shoe which is suspended on string by two men from a window above. It alludes to the story about a room in the Keeper's house which came to be known as 'the shoe', according to the prison reformer
Debt bondage, also known as debt slavery, bonded labour, or peonage, is the pledge of a person's services as security for the repayment for a debt or other obligation. Where the terms of the repayment are not clearly or reasonably stated, or where the debt is excessively large the person who holds the debt has thus some control over the laborer, whose freedom depends on the undefined or excessive debt repayment. The services required to repay the debt may be undefined, and the services' duration may be undefined, thus allowing the person supposedly owed the debt to demand services indefinitely. Debt bondage can be passed on from generation to generation.
Child labor in brick kilns in South Asia
Workers storing rice in India in 1952
A worker preparing fish caught off the coast of South Africa