Abstract
The practice of credit scoring is ubiquitous in today’s economy. Three-digit credit scores or their underlying data are applied well beyond the lending decisions for which they were originally designed and are routinely used in the contexts of employment, housing, and more. Drawing on carceral logics and abolitionist politics, we develop a framework to critically interpret the practice of credit scoring. We theorize credit scoring as a carceral practice and technology in the afterlife of slavery that expands anti-black discipline and punishment. We suggest that credit scoring is incapable of objectively assessing risk and that claims of objectivity legitimize an exploitative system of evaluation that mediates people’s access to the means of survival. Moreover, credit scoring expands the scope of how people are conscripted into consumerism and disciplined and punished under racial capitalism. We review research literature on credit scoring as a step toward applying this framework and demonstrate how research provides an alibi for anti-black racism embedded in contemporary credit scores. We conclude with a call to abolish the practice of credit scoring and imagine new, abolitionist alternatives for people to live safely and with dignity.
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Notes
We note differences between related yet distinct products in the context of credit and offer definitions. A credit report is a statement that contains information about a person’s credit activities, such as histories of loan payments, status of credit accounts, and property liens and bankruptcies. A credit score is a three-digit numerical ordering produced by algorithmic processing of data from a person’s credit bureau files. The algorithms used to produce a person’s credit score can be different depending on the context, such as in rendering decisions about insurance versus lending products. The distinctions between a credit report and credit score can matter for identifying precise harms. We attempt to use the appropriate term for discussing the precise product at hand throughout our paper, where these terms appear. At the same time, we also deploy the phrase “the practice of credit scoring” to consider this set of related products in the context of credit.
During slavery, White women had owned enslaved black people, independent from their husbands or family estates, and they leveraged human chattel for accessing credit and taking out loans (Jones-Rogers, 2020).
We recognize the longer and more nuanced histories in the transitions from slave patrols to policing and present-day mass incarceration; though, we simplify this history here due to space limitations.
Data on race or ethnicity are not routinely available outside of the context of mortgage lending. This is because the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) requires lenders to collect this demographic information, yet protections under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) prohibit lenders from collecting racial demographic information.
The text of congressional legislation H.R. 3621 is available here: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/3621.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank the Abolitionist Social Change Collective (ASCC) and participants of the University of California Washington Center’s Abolitions Conference for their valuable feedback on early drafts of this paper. We also thank participants for their comments during a convening sponsored by The New School’s Institute on Race, Power, and Political Economy, including Drs. Darrick Hamilton, Grieve Chelwa, and Suparna Bhaskaran.
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Friedline, T., Stewart, K., Bolinger, C. et al. Credit Scoring as a Carceral Practice: An Abolitionist Framework. Race Soc Probl 16, 230–248 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-023-09406-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-023-09406-6