Fred Wherry is the Townsend Marin, Class of 1917 Professor of Sociology at Princeton University, where he is also the Vice Dean for Faculty Development and Inclusion, and founder of the Debt Collection Lab.

Marie-Lou Laprise is a postgraduate research associate in the Department of Sociology at Princeton University. A quantitative and computational sociologist, she studies collective intelligence and the social impact of AI. 

Over a quarter of Americans report that their household has been contacted by a debt collector in the past year, and for many, this is their primary encounter with the institutions that enforce private claims. Building on the concepts of predatory inclusion and legal estrangement, we argue that civil debt enforcement constitutes a distinct, stratified pathway to institutional distrust—one that parallels and compounds the criminal justice pathway. We introduce the concept of financial estrangement to theorize how the terms of households' inclusion in credit markets shape their relations with the institutions that enforce private claims. Our concept of financial estrangement brings together concerns from economic sociology, law and society, criminal justice, and race and inequality, and applies them to the context of the marketplace for consumer debt. Drawing on an original probabilistic survey of 2,115 U.S. adults, we show that debt-collection contact is pervasive, racially unequal, and not reducible to differences in household income or financial hardship. Americans overwhelmingly find widespread debt-collection practices unfair, particularly those who have experienced them. Careful analysis reveals that debt-collection contact is associated with perceiving courts as rarely or never fair, even after accounting for hardship levels, income, race/ethnicity, and arrest history. These findings suggest that civil legal processes tied to mass debt contribute to race- and class-stratified patterns of institutional trust.