Vagrancy laws effectively criminalized male unemployment and homelessness

Evidence

The police were a kind of civilian army, working on behalf of the respectable and the comfortable; the enemy was the “dangerous classes.” The term included some who were actually dangerous to the established order; the threat from tramps and vagrants was largely symbolic. The main threat of the tramp or hobo was to the work ethic. Hobos did not work, and many did not even want to work. But many others were simply jobless. Vagrancy laws gave the police blanket powers to arrest and harass members of this nomadic group; these laws, in effect, criminalized “male economic dependency, homelessness, and unemployment.” — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3285

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Vagrancy laws criminalized unemployment almost exclusively for black men. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 280; Post-slavery labor exploitation criminalized black unemployment to force unpaid work — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 46; Post-emancipation Black Codes criminalized work refusal and reestablished forced labor — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project: A New American Origin…, 384 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Post-slavery labor exploitation criminalized black unemployment to force unpaid work #expands (0.90) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 46
• Vagrancy laws criminalized unemployment almost exclusively for black men. #expands (0.85) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 280
• Post-emancipation Black Codes criminalized work refusal and reestablished forced labor #expands (0.85) — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 384
• Crossing city lines to find work could be criminalized as vagrancy #exemplifies (0.85) — Lyn H. Lofland, World of Strangers_ Order and Action in…, 515
• Mass incarceration functions as a management system for surplus labor. #expands (0.80) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 244
• Early capitalist states criminalized the newly dispossessed poor as vagabonds #expands (0.80) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 72
• The Thirteenth Amendment’s crime clause legalized post-emancipation re-enslavement via penal servitude #expands (0.70)
• Incarceration functions as warehousing of poor and unassimilated populations #expands (0.70) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 466
• Antiblack discrimination migrated from vagrancy laws into drug enforcement #expands (0.70) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 409
• Time-based prison sentences mirror the commodification of labor time #expands (0.70) — Davis, Angela Y, Are Prisons Obsolete, 111