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The article discusses various aspects of night watch patrols and police practices in places such as Boston, Massachusetts during America's early republic era, and it mentions how the activities of night watchmen became part of the everyday, common, quotidian state of affairs. According to the article, watchmen were integral in stopping disorderly behavior, as well as assisting with people without lodging. Crime, vagrancy, and nuisance are assessed.

This article analyzes the Polish police narrative on Roma during the interwar time, unveiling attitudes and potential practices. According to the police journals and handbooks, Roma were mobile and disposed to theft and deceit. Their traditional crafts were merely a smoke screen for illicit activities. As countermeasures, searches of caravans, meticulous checks of identity documents, indiscriminate fingerprinting of Roma suspects, among several measures, were recommended. This narrative constituted part of a larger police professional discourse and is likely to be an indicator of practices on Roma. Polish police followed the contemporary European expertise on Roma produced by the fields of criminalistics and criminology. As there were no discriminatory laws targeting Roma in Poland, it appears that police used legislation against begging and vagrancy, among other tactics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter might be productively read alongside the coda, where Nicolazzo elaborates on the connections between queer theory and the aesthetic temporality of vagrancy and policing. Sal Nicolazzo's I Vagrant Figures i makes a case for how transatlantic systems of policing are not born out of historical inevitability; rather, these systems are connected to the durable and pliable category of vagrancy. Nicolazzo's last chapter sharpens the relationship between vagrancy law in English-speaking colonies and slavery by turning to Olaudah Equiano's I The Interesting Narrative i (1789). [Extracted from the article]

This article proposes a comparative study of everyday police controls of vagrants in two Belgian cities – a port city and a capital city – at the end of the nineteenth century, a period that was characterized by heightened mobility and social fear about the so-called ‘masterless poor’. The first section of the article looks at the annual arrest and prosecution rates for vagrancy in Antwerp and Brussels between 1880 and 1910, as well as at the daily instructions from the city authorities and police chiefs to their policemen on how to deal with vagrants and unwanted newcomers. Next, drawing on a selection of archival records of the central police divisions of Antwerp and Brussels from the 1880s, we examine if and how police controls focused on mobile groups when they dealt with vagrancy, and whether they answered the preoccupations of local authorities. In line with the findings of other scholars, we demonstrate that the notion of vagrancy was so elastic that, in both cities, many different groups were arrested and prosecuted for this offense. In addition to foreign and internal migrants, the Antwerp and Brussels police also apprehended local people, born in the city or in the surrounding province, who were not necessarily mobile and often known to them. To explain this phenomenon, we argue that, in practice, the policing of vagrancy was not only shaped by top-down repression, but also by bottom-up uses of the police by vulnerable individuals in need of shelter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Historia y Sociedad (01218417) is the property of Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Facultad de Ciencias Humanas y Economicas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The paper analyses the control of labor mobility through the livret d'ouvriers (1803–1890): a sort of internal passport aiming to subordinate workers' circulation to the abidance of contract terms. The effective enforcement of livrets had a limited scope for various reasons. Nevertheless, those same difficulties offer a privileged perspective from which to analyze the shifting meanings of freedom and coercion in relation to labor poverty. The politics of identification show that it has been necessary to politically act on the spatial organization of productive processes in order to control labor through time, reacting to workers' mobility as a specific form of collective bargaining. Through the lens of labor defection we see the emergence of a form of integration deriving from the cash nexus, the vehicle of market concurrence. Such integration calls for a form of control which cannot be subsumed within common law and that is rather axed on the modulation of market pressure – which we analyze through the 1850 debate over advance pay. From this perspective, the issues of breach of contract, police identification and debt insolvency allow to rethink the notion of coercion beyond its penal criminalization and, consequently, to frame the continuities between the police des manufactures, and the modern welfare State. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that research into preventive and pre-emptive crime control in the United Kingdom has marginalized the historical persistence of the power to arrest and convict on justified suspicion of intent. It traces the genesis of this power in statute law (particularly the Vagrancy Act of 1824) and demonstrates its consistent use in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It shows how this pre-emptive power was fiercely defended by police authorities, particularly during the rise of the 'civil liberties' agenda during the 1930s, only losing ground when use of these powers became entangled with debates about race relations in the 1970s. Overall, the article argues that 'pre-emptive' arrest and conviction on suspicion of intent have been a significant component of UK police powers since the later eighteenth century, and seeks to demonstrate the value of historical criminology in problematizing contemporary debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses police officer Alfred John List and his influence on rural policing in the Scottish counties from roughly 1832 to 1877. It comments on his early career in the Metropolitan Police of London, England and his time leading the Haddingtonshire police of East Lothian, Scotland and the Edinburghshire police of Midlothian, Scotland. The theories set forth in List's book "A Practical Treatise on Rural Police" are explored. Other topics include the issue of vagrancy and the transition of policing from a part-time to a full-time occupation.

This article uses insights from sociology, criminology and anthropology to establish patterns of disorder in early-to-mid twentieth century London. As criminal statistics are shown to be the products of both behavioural and institutional practices, this discussion opens with an examination of police culture to comprehend the range of variables influencing decision making on the beat. The second section develops this occupational model further to interpret the trends shown by the statistics. With this appreciation of policing in practice, the third part argues that integrating Taylor's supply-side approach with a street-level understanding of the relationship between police and policed, while considering the broader socio-economic context, allows for measured inferences about social changes to be drawn from prosecution records. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Middle East Technical University Studies in Development is the property of METU Studies in Development and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Works which have examined the relationship between economic conditions and the criminal justice system have usually attempted so 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 and persistence of relationships between selected economic conditions and police 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 felony/misdemeanor arrests or number of police employees and economic conditions. This present study suggests support for the previous findings 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, is points to the value of developing and analysing long term historical data bases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the operation and validity of several types of laws, most often passed by municipal legislatures, which regulate the citizen's use of the public streets. To be considered, also, is the often asserted right of the police to stop and question persons on the street in the absence of circumstances justifying arrest and detention. In varying degrees, many municipalities have on the books curfew, loitering, dress, and association laws. The penalties attached to the violation of these laws are usually slight, and usually they are never enforced, or at most, sporadically enforced, and even then only against those persons such as juveniles and vagrants who would not be expected to appeal from the decisions of the magistrate type of court which most often has jurisdiction in these cases. It is not unusual, therefore, that there are few cases in the reports dealing with such laws. Nevertheless, because freedom of movement, dress, and association are, no doubt, activities having constitutional implications, and because such laws have been widely enacted, it is important that these restrictions be closely scrutinized. The police generally have the authority to arrest and detain, without warrant, (1) those persons who commit a crime in the presence of the officer or, (2) when a specific crime, which is within the policeman's knowledge, has been committed and there is reasonable cause for believing the arrested person committed it.