Credit Scoring as a Carceral Practice: An Abolitionist Framework

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.