Universal Basic Income perpetuates the illusion of state-provided liberation for Black communities while further targeting and criminalizing them through criminal legal debt collection

Criminal legal debt provides a revealing lens through which to examine universal basic income (UBI). It highlights a path to potential failure: fetishizing labor markets as the engine of economic inequality ignores how today’s criminal legal system carries forward racial capitalism’s techniques of targeted extraction. Yet recognizing this also opens a door to more robust visions of UBI that join together the powers of work refusal and debt refusal. UBI’s radical appeal has been staked to its potential to enable in practice and convey in principle a refusal of the labor market. As Kathi Weeks explains in theorizing a “post-work imaginary,” this does not require an absence of work but rather its decentering as an organizing institutional and cultural principle. And UBI would simultaneously shift power relations within waged work (as well as between waged and unwaged workers in families & communities), the centerpiece of Erik Olin Wright’s embrace of UBI as “eroding capitalism” over time. The work refusal analysis focuses on income. UBI would relieve the “work or starve” dilemma that enables labor exploitation. To do this, income must put food on the table. That places perhaps undue faith in consumer markets (as Lydia Nicholson points out). But furthermore, income can be forcibly removed before it can be used, through debt collection. This observation occasionally crops up with regard to taxation in analyses of UBI financing and tax-transfer integration. There, however, the significance (setting aside broader critiques of a financing frame, like that of Raúl Carrillo’s) involves how offsetting taxes on higher income people complicate the expressive and practical commitment to universality. Of greater concern is how UBI might be taxed back from the most marginalized, those for whom an independent income stream might be most empowering. This is where criminal legal debt fits in. Criminal imposition and enforcement of economic sanctions doubly amplifies the racial construction of economic inequality. It lies at the intersection between racialized, and particularly anti-Black, policing and punishment and also the vulnerability produced by racial structures operating within conventionally “economic” spaces of labor, housing, credit markets and so on. Accounting for this goes beyond defending formal universalism by including not only unauthorized immigrants but also currently or formerly incarcerated people. A UBI responsive to systematically racialized economic extraction must address not only historically-informed reparations but also ongoing predation. Building on USDOJ’s Ferguson report, advocates in California have documented a vicious cycle of fines and fees exacerbated by racial profiling in traffic stops, racially concentrated inability to pay that triggers drivers’ license suspensions, then arrests for driving without a license after further racially targeted stops, and more debt and risk of incarceration. A multi-state survey of formerly incarcerated people and their families found an average of $13,607 in criminal legal debt, more than the entire annual value of presidential candidate Andrew Yang’s recent UBI proposal. And Alexes Harris’ pathbreaking research found comparable debt burdens–and pervasive inability to pay–among people with felony convictions in Washington State. It would be ironic indeed if a UBI slipped quickly through the fingers of lower-income people of color and into the coffers of jurisdictions most aggressively criminalizing poverty. This would negate UBI’s ability to facilitate work refusal because UBI—devoured by debt—would no longer be available to meet basic needs without a wage (or connection to a wage-earner). Moreover, this negation’s radically unequal racial distribution would mock UBI’s pretensions to universalism. Substantive universality requires more than formal inclusion and nominally equal payments. It requires cash receipts that deliver equal capacity to refuse work. There are concrete reasons to fear this grim outcome, given both the predominant frameworks for regulating criminal legal debt and the loopholes built into some prototypes for UBI. The legal and conceptual architecture for resisting criminal legal debt largely adopts an “ability-to-pay” framework that highlights the injustice of incarcerating (or otherwise punishing) people who are unable to pay. But this same approach authorizes arrest and incarceration of anyone who chooses to refuse, despite having the money to pay. Indeed, some critics of the “new debtors prisons” might be tempted to embrace UBI precisely because it enables payment: losing your basic income is better than jail. As Theresa Zhen has argued, the ability-to-pay framework risks legitimizing the criminal legal system’s deployment as a tool of racialized economic extraction. UBI would provide a whopper of racially stratified fiscal substitution, with state and local criminal legal systems able to (selectively) capture national basic income payments. This also would blunt one of criminal debt abolitionists’ pragmatic arguments: that these onerous debts are rarely collectible. Contrary both to UBI’s universalism and work refusal goals, this would dynamically entrench racial labor stratification by creating racially differentiated capacity to refuse work. Indeed, we can already glimpse that prospect in today’s coercive systems of “get to work or go to jail” often styled as debt enforcement. And the differentially precarious economic circumstances of people with criminal records already helps concentrate them in the worst jobs. In complementary fashion, precedent exists for diverting basic income to satisfy criminal legal debt. Alaska’s Permanent Fund Dividend (APFD) program often is touted as a UBI prototype. But its garnishment protections are substantially weaker than those currently applicable to wage garnishment. The vast majority (80%) of an individual’s dividend can be seized to satisfy any creditor’s judgment. The remainder is protected against most ordinary civil debts but explicitly exposed to certain collections–including of criminal legal debt. Another related, though less sweeping, example is the deduction of student loan and child support arrears from recent pandemic stimulus checks.