Imprisonment for debt was abolished as economically wasteful, not only inhumane.

Evidence

The abolition of imprisonment for debt was one symptom of changing attitudes. This was not just a humanitarian gesture. As William E. Nelson has pointed out, bankruptcy and insolvency laws are “sensible arrangements in an industrialized society”; a man does not lose his ability to work, to produce, when he goes bankrupt, but he does when he sits in jail. Imprisonment for debt was thus both cruel and inefficient. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 1601