By 1649, the authors of the second Digger manifesto identified the prison – alongside the scaffold and the sword – as a key facet of the state’s violent and coercive power. Although prisons were not yet the primary means of punishing crime, early modern England was witnessing new experimentations in incarceration as a form of social, economic, political and religious discipline. While the quickening activity of the criminal justice system left growing numbers of suspected felons in custody awaiting trial and houses of correction innovated new carceral responses to poverty and vagrancy, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century debt crisis drove a precipitous growth in prison populations and widespread social concern with incarceration. Rapidly expanding credit networks, the commercialisation of the economy and growing levels of civil litigation created new extremes of downward mobility and social dislocation that led growing numbers of debtors to the prison. Unprecedented levels of incarceration underpinned fragile credit relations built upon trust and interpersonal judgement. Imprisonment for debt played a vital role in maintaining financial and social stability in a time of economic change. It regulated and publicised financial failure by generating and disseminating social knowledge about morality, trustworthiness and (dis)honesty.