![]() ![]() In this image from 1877 that echoes what unfolded in Philadelphia, a group of vagrants leaves a New York police station in the morning having stayed there overnight to avoid having to sleep on the streets during the winter. Colonial Pennsylvania’s laws were less punitive, calling for the arrest and brief incarceration of beggars, individuals perceived by a justice of the peace to be nonresident destitute persons, and individuals considered to be vagabonds-generally open to the interpretation of justices. ![]() This law remained on the books, if not in use, until at least 1838. One harsh New Jersey statute passed in 1774 even stipulated that vagrants who returned to a district that ejected them would be punished with twenty lashes at the whipping post. Justices of the peace, magistrates, and constables had authority to arrest or eject individuals who appeared to “have no visible means to maintain themselves,” who were “idle,” had “no legal residence,” or “followed no trade” so that destitute individuals would not add to the burden of publicly-funded poor relief. Vague Statutesįrom the eighteenth to the nineteenth centuries, vagrancy statutes were notoriously vague, and officials frequently used them to prosecute individuals considered to be intoxicated, disorderly, or sexually deviant. This was largely because vagrancy statutes often fell within poor laws, which were similar to later statutory welfare policies and governed subsistence aid to the poor. When transplanted to the colonies, these laws were used primarily to penalize movement by the lower classes. Vagrancy laws adopted by colonists in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, as in most other English colonies in America, derived from fifteenth-century English laws requiring all persons who did not own property to work. The changing ways in which it was managed reflected larger shifts in American approaches to criminal justice, poverty, and migration. As a concept, vagrancy became central to social thought regarding class distinctions in the United States throughout most of the nation’s history. The term vagrancy described the status of individuals with no settled residence or long-term employment, but it also became a way of defining unsettled forms of poverty as crimes. ( Library of Congress)įrom the colonial era to the twenty-first century, vagrants-individuals who could be convicted of the crime of vagrancy-have been labelled legally and colloquially as wanderers, vagabonds, beggars, tramps, and hobos. This illustration by Alice Barber Stephens depicts a busy corner in the shoemakers room at the Philadelphia Almshouse during the 1870s. Laws created to aid them as well as control their presence in the region were influential in shaping the legal culture of the United States. ![]() Since the colonial era, it has been a driving social concern in the Mid-Atlantic region, where urban centers, including Philadelphia, attracted poor migrants seeking new economic prospects. Vagrancy, generally defined as the act of continuous geographical movement by the poor, often has been interpreted to signify idleness, unemployment, and homelessness. Philadelphia, the Place that Loves You Back. ![]()
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