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In this article I trace a history of the most ubiquitous visual symbol of madness: the staff. First, I argue that the staff, in its variants (such as the pinwheel) and with its attachments (such as an inflated bladder), represents madness as air. It thus represents madness as an invisible entity that must be made visible. Secondly, I claim that the staff – being iconic of other ‘unwanted’ categories such as vagabonds – represents the insane as outsiders. Also in this case, the staff serves the purpose of making madness visible. Through this interpretation I show that the urge to make madness visible outlives icons of insanity such as the staff, making it a constant presence in popular culture and medical practice.

Objects have social lives like humans and are invested with the properties of social relations. We restore performativity to the journeying objects of the Maseit street magicians by drawing on our ethnography with this wayfaring community from Kathputli Colony, Delhi. The shifting social incarnations of the magicians’ objects threaten law’s desire for semantic closure. Their truncated movements indicate how law traps the fluid history of street magic in a rigid definitional register by criminalising it as begging. By mapping these journeys, we illuminate the ways in which the Maseit make sense of their lives within the legal framework.

Contemporary historical and medical writing on impairment in the medieval period claim the disabled were blighted evidence of God’s disfavour. Such opinions are often tautologies, unsupported by fourteenth-century primary sources such as Piers Plowman and Lollard writings. Vagrancy proclamations (1495), and dissolution of monasteries from 1538 encouraged self-sufficiency. Impairment may not have equalled poverty.

In Progressive Era Chicago, jobless men, sex workers, and black migrants were regulated through scales of vice, vagrancy, and race. But this regulation was challenged. The jobless and homeless men in Chicago’s vagrancy scale rejected popular censure and criminal sanction. The sex workers who made up Chicago’s vice scale resisted vice prohibitions. Like jobless and homeless men, they disaggregated and produced mini scales that defied the efforts of authorities to contain and eliminate their practices. Black migrants contested the de facto segregation and the racial covenants that bolstered Chicago’s race scale, which developed during the Great Migration on the city’s south side. Tracking the shifts and fluctuations of Chicago’s legal landscapes, this article stresses the agency of marginal men and women in the design and organization of the built environment in the industrial city.

In this article, the author draws upon ethnographic data from a group of homeless and housed youth and young adults who congregated in one city square in the northeastern United States. The author applies social capital theories to understand the positive and negative aspects of street life for each group involved. In this setting, participants found commonalities and befriended one another. By maintaining and nurturing these ties, each group expanded their access to both practical and symbolic resources and provided one another with affective supports, which alleviated feelings of alienation and isolation. Participants benefited in multiple ways by participating, but also placed themselves in potentially harmful and problematic situations as a result. The author explores the utility as well as consequences of extended social ties made through these subgroup affiliations to understand the nuances of social capital and the role of diversified peer groups within homeless street settings.

This paper draws on the problematisation of squeegeeing and aggressive panhandling during the mid to late 1990s and early 2000s in Toronto, to explore the way concerns about public disorder are framed within political discourse. In so doing, it highlights and remedies an important void in the literature which connects vagrancy legislation to concerns about consumption. While this literature does well to expose how vagrancy law is enacted and deployed for consumption, it does little to explicate the production of the rhetoric of consumption itself. What requires attention is the way consumption is linked to and conflated with the rhetorics of civility and community: the former serving to optimise consumption; the latter to resolve the paradoxes of consumption. The enactment and deployment of vagrancy law, therefore, ought to be situated within what may be called the community–civility–consumption triad.

Immigration of Indian indentured labourers to work on various overseas destinations began over the debris of slavery and this led to a never ending debate over the nature of indenture labour regime in terms of the freedom and unfreedom of the labour. This article attempts to argue that the problematic of this incessant debate lies in referring to ‘classic’ slavery as the closed model of reference for all forms of labour servitude. By studying the historical experiences of Indian in-dentured labourers in Mauritius, this article attempts to shift the core of this debate from institu-tional definitions to the decisive role of circumstantial necessities and perspectives culminating in multiple forms of labour servitude. This article examines the question of freedom and unfreedom in the indentured labour regime at two levels of ascendency—the physical and the moral—being exemplified through the regulation of vagrancy among the Indian indentured labourers, the language of command and the colonial lexicon while referring to the Indian labourers; and it concludes that the indenture labour regime was a form of servitude, though not essentially a new system of slavery, as the labour was denied of its economic freedom and occupational and ter-ritorial mobility in the indenture system.

This article reconsiders the policies applied by the colonial state with regard to European ‘loafers’ or vagrants in colonial India, thereby raising a number of questions about the relationship between the categories of ‘race’ and ‘class’ in colonial settings. It starts with a discussion of the intellectual roots of the class prejudices towards working–class Europeans dating back to the Company era, and offers a brief survey of the economic and demographic developments in mid–nineteenth century which brought the issue of ‘white poverty’ to the foreground. The article then focuses on the workhouse system introduced in the 1870s. The main argument brought forward here is that the ‘reclamation’ of European loafers can be regarded as an ‘internal’ civilising mission which shared many features with the ‘external’ mission civilisatrice directed at the Indian population. It is demonstrated that the colonial government's vagrancy policy was largely designed to protect the bluff of ‘colonial difference’ underlying the ‘external’ imperial civilising project. However, it also becomes clear that here, again, the colonial state could never fully realise its ‘civilising’ fantasies, both due to financial constraints and the white subalterns’ strong will to resist.

Little is known about the ways in which the elites perceive the poor, especially in those societies where poverty is most prevalent. The poor are dependent on the elites, but the elites are also affected by the poor: their presence creates negative external effects in the lives of the elites (threats such as crime, contagion, pollution, vagrancy and rebellion) but they also represent opportunities for the established strata (as potential workers, soldiers and, more recently, as consumers and voters). Members of the elites cannot ward off these threats, or realize the opportunities on their own: that requires collective action on their part. Thus, an awareness of these interdependencies and a sense of responsibility among the elites, a `social consciousness', may well be a necessary condition for intervention to reduce poverty. This article presents the theoretical and methodological reflections underlying a comparative research project into elite perceptions of poverty.

Taking Turkey as an example, this article focuses on the exhibition and reception of Indian films in the 1950s. It begins with a close analysis of Awara (Vagabond) (Raj Kapoor, 1951), comparing the Turkish dubbed version with the original film. Identifying the “significant variations” between these two versions, it notes that Awara was re-presented as a non-national film utilizing Turkified character names and selective scene deletion, common practices for international films exhibited in Turkey at the time. The article goes on to evaluate the ways in which the film was promoted and distributed throughout Turkey and analyzes various discourses on Awara, circulated through local reviews, news articles, advertisements, illustrations, and cartoons. Observing how culturally specific conditions of exhibition shape audience reception, it suggests that Indian cinema had a specific role in mediating competing discourses on cultural identity, modernity, and national cinema in Turkey.

The role that alcohol plays in facilitating crime is widely acknowledged, and alcohol's relationship to crimes against persons has been well documented. Nevertheless, there have been few systematic attempts to examine the dynamics of what are referred to as alcohol-related crimes (driving under the influence, public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, vagrancy, and liquor law violations). Given that these offenses account for approximately one third of the arrests made annually in the United States, the role of alcohol in these offenses clearly warrants analysis. The present study examines the relationship of alcohol availability in each state, as measured by the prevalence of various types of alcohol outlets, to arrest rates for alcohol-related offenses, controlling for relevant demographic and socioeconomic variables. The results indicate that density and type of alcohol outlets are, indeed, significant predictors of alcohol-related crimes. The findings suggest, however, that outlets have widely varied effects for different alcohol-related offenses. Explanations and policy implications for the findings are discussed.

Overcrowding in local jails has emerged as an important social problem in recent years. Many have assumed that this problem has resulted from rising crime rates and general population growth, but recent research has called into question such claims. This study examines jail overcrowding in the county detention center in Las Vegas, Nevada. The data show that the major causes of jail overcrowding include a rise in the arrest rate for certain crimes, such as driving under the influence, domestic violence, drugs and vagrancy, along with recent legislative changes, questionable police practices, and the punitive nature of some of Nevada's laws.

Part I -- Imagining Mass. Chapter 1 -- Individuality and Susceptibility: The Consumption of Agency in Social Structures, Barry Barnes, University of Exeter. Chapter 2 -- Pass the Salt: Materiality and the Production of Mass for Consumption, Dan Rose, University of Pennsylvania. Chapter 3 -- Consuming Mass: Mutability and Consumption, Robert Cooper, Keele University. Part II -- Community and Mass. Chapter 4 -- The Consumption of Masses: Calculating Community for Maximum Impact and Instant Obsolescence, Zygmunt Bauman, Leeds University (Emeritus). Chapter 5 -- Ordering Otherness: The Consumption and Disposal of Others, Christina Palli Monguilod, Aotonoma University. Chapter 6 -- The Waiting of Mass: Individuality and the Process of Double Forgetting, Rolland Munro, Keele University. Part III -- Writing and Mass. Chapter 7 -- All Consuming Passions: The Refiguiring of Subjectivity in later Twentieth Century Discourses of Consumption, Joanna Latimer, Keele University. Chapter 8 -- The Mystery of the Assumption: Womena s Writing and Endless Consumption, Heather Hopfl, Bolton . Chapter 9 -- The Consumption of Mass: Interpreting Luck and the Mass Average, Jane Parish, Keel University. Part IV -- Performing Mass. Chapter 10 -- The Consumption of Vagrancy, Thomas Bay and Per Backius, University of Stockholm. Chapter 11 -- The Consumption of Bass: Technoa s Funky Alien and the Contusion of Mass, Rob Beeston, Keele University. Chapter 12 -- Border Blues: Maastricht and Dada Disorder, Robert Grafton Small, Keel University

Using arrest statistics of the Uniform Crime Reports for the years of 1964 and 1984, this report examines the claim of some commentators of rising levels of and more serious criminality on the part of elderly persons. The first year when arrest figures are broken out by age 65 and over is 1964. There have been sharp rises in elderly arrest rates for three offenses: larceny-theft, driving under influence, and other but traffic. But the rates have fallen sharply for four offenses: public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, gambling, and vagrancy. Both today and 20 years ago, elderly arrests are overwhelmingly for alcohol-related crimes (but the type of "alcohol" crime has changed somewhat). There has been, however, somewhat of a crime-profile shift toward comparatively more arrests for larceny-theft (shoplifting), especially on the part of the elderly female offender. The most important finding is that the proportionate criminal involvement of the elderly is about the same now as two decades ago, in spite of dramatic fluctuations in arrest rates for some offenses. Actually, when considering only the directionality of change, the trend is a small decline in the relative criminality of the elderly across the majority of UCR offenses, including the "serious" crimes. This trend pattern was held for both elderly males and elderly females.

In the late twenties, Thurstone (1727b) had subjects choose between all possible pairs of 19 crimes and offenses. Using the method of pair comparisons, he built a scale of crimes from the more serious as rape and homicide to the less serious as bootlegging and vagrancy. This study was one of the earliest quantitative studies of attitudes and was replicated 40 yr. later by Coombs ( 1967), who found changing patterns of attitudes reflecting changes in societal structure as evolved during the intervening years. The present study is a 50-yr.-later attempt to continue Thurstone's legacy. The analysis of contemporary data was complemented by reanalysis of the preceding studies using a more powerful computational model. The reanalysis of the data collected earlier also permitted the direct comparison between scales obtained from all three studies. METHOD

Works which have examined the relationship between economic conditions and the criminal justice system have usually attempted to explain criminality within specific, short term time periods. Conclusions based upon these efforts have been mixed and ambiguous. This present study uses Chicago Police Department variables as indicators of organizational activities and investigates the duration andpersistence of relationships between selected economic conditions andpolice organizational measures. Nearly 100 years of annual City of Chicago data are examined in a two step, lagged, time series regression analysis. The findings show that a persistent historical relationship exists between vagrancy arrests and economic conditions but does not exist between felonylmisdemeanor arrests or number of police employees and economic conditions. This present study suggests supportfor the previousfindings of Chambliss (1964, 1976), Wellford (1974), and Land and Felson (1976), and reveals the necessity of further model development in specifying the historical interaction between the economy and the criminal justice system. Lastly, it points to the value of developing and analysing long term historical data bases.