Cars, Debt, and Carcerality

Abstract

Consumer lore in the United States celebrates the automobile as a “freedom machine,” consecrating the mobility of a free people. Yet, paradoxically, the car also functions at the crossroads of two great systems of unfreedom and immobility—the debt economy and the carceral state. Drawing on interviews with formerly incarcerated people, this article investigates this paradox in detail, tracing how the long arms of carcerality and debt operate in tandem in the daily life of car use and ownership. It describes the ways in which credit dovetails with capture—pretextual traffic stops, revenue policing from fines and fees, the overreach of automobile-related surveillance, the predatory auto loan and repossession businesses, and criminal justice debt—all shot through with profound racial bias. In the autocentric United States, transportation is a basic need, yet it has never been recognized or funded as a public good. As the “age of mobility” beckons, with autonomous driving as its technological centerpiece, the authors call for the social liberation of the automobile. From the outset, the automobile has traded on the romance of the open road, but it has too long served as a vehicle of inequality and injustice.