Читать книгу The Jail - John Irwin - Страница 11

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Managing Rabble

IN A LEGAL SENSE, the jail is the point of entry into the criminal justice system. It is the place where arrested persons are booked and where they are held for their court appearances if they cannot arrange bail. It is also the city or county detention facility for persons serving misdemeanor sentences, which in most states cannot exceed one year. The prison, on the other hand, is a state or federal institution that holds persons serving felony sentences, which generally run to more than one year.

The public impression is that the jail holds a collection of dangerous criminals. But familiarity and close inspection reveal that the jail holds only a very few persons who fit the popular conception of a criminal—a predator who seriously threatens the lives and property of ordinary citizens. In fact, the great majority of the persons arrested and held in jail belong to a different social category. Some students of the jail have politely referred to them as the poor: “American jails operate primarily as catchall asylums for poor people.”¹ Some have added other correlates of poverty: “With few exceptions, the prisoners are poor, undereducated, unemployed, and they belong to minority groups.”² Some use more imaginative and sociologically suggestive labels, such as “social refuse” or “social junk.”³ Political radicals sometimes use “lumpen proletariat” and argue over whether its members are capable of participating in the class struggle.⁴ Some citizens refer to persons in this category as “street people,” implying an excessive and improper public presence. Others apply such labels as “riffraff,” “social trash,” or “dregs,” which suggest lack of social worth and moral depravity. And many police officers, deputies, and other persons who are familiar with the jail population use more crudely derogatory labels, such as “assholes” and “dirt balls.”

In my own research, I found that beyond poverty and its correlates—undereducation, unemployment, and minority status—jail prisoners share two essential characteristics: detachment and disrepute. They are detached because they are not well integrated into conventional society, they are not members of conventional social organizations, they have few ties to conventional social networks, and they are carriers of unconventional values and beliefs. They are disreputable because they are perceived as irksome, offensive, threatening, capable of arousal, even protorevolutionary. In this book I shall refer to them as the rabble, meaning the “disorganized” and “disorderly,” the “lowest class of people.”⁵

I found that it is these two features—detachment and disrepute—that lead the police to watch and arrest the rabble so frequently, regardless of whether or not they are engaged in crime, or at least in serious crime. (Most of the rabble commit petty crimes, such as drinking on the street, and are usually vulnerable to arrest.)

These findings suggest that the basic purpose of the jail differs radically from the purpose ascribed to it by government officials and academicians. It is this: the jail was invented, and continues to be operated, in order to manage society’s rabble. Society’s impulse to manage the rabble has many sources, but the subjectively perceived “offensiveness” of the rabble is at least as important as any real threat it poses to society.

The contemporary jail is a subsidiary to the welfare organizations that are intended to “regulate the poor.” Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have pointed out that when masses of occupationally dislocated people pose a threat, society applies social control devices, such as relief programs:

When large numbers of people are suddenly barred from their traditional occupations, the entire structure of social control is weakened and may even collapse. There is no harvest or paycheck to enforce work and the sentiments that uphold work; without work, people cannot conform to familial and communal roles; and if the dislocation is widespread, the legitimacy of the social order itself may come to be questioned. The result is usually civil disorder—crime, mass protests, riots—a disorder that may even threaten to overturn existing social and economic arrangements. It is then that relief programs are initiated or expanded.⁶

However, from among the poor there will also emerge a rabble who are perceived as a more serious and constant threat to the social order, a group in need of the more direct forms of social control delivered by the criminal justice system. Usually the more violent and rapacious rabble are arrested, convicted, and sent to prison; the merely offensive are held in jail. The jail was devised as, and continues to be, the special social device for controlling offensive rabble. To demonstrate this proposition, I will review briefly the history of the jail in England and its later development in America.

Historical Development of the English Jail

All ancient cities used some method of detaining persons in order to impose punishment. According to Hans Mattick: “Unscalable pits, dungeons, suspended cages, and sturdy trees to which prisoners were chained pending trial are some of the predecessors of the jail.”⁷ As early as the ninth century in England, Alfred the Great’s laws mentioned imprisonment: “If he, however, pledge what is right for him to fulfill, and belie that, let him give with lowly mindedness his weapon and his goods to his friends to hold, and be forty nights in prison in a king’s town, and suffer there as the Bishop assigns him; and let his kinsmen feed him if he himself have no meat.”⁸ Probably the persons sentenced were held in castles or monastery buildings. And in his history of imprisonment in England, Ralph Pugh notes: “There is no doubt that the Normans found a number of prisons in the England that they invaded, particularly upon royal manors in the south, and, in effect, they added to their number. This they did by building many castles in which both king and barons shut up their powerful adversaries and during the Anarchy very many of the common people also.”⁹

The jail, however, was a new institution in medieval England. It was a special structure, erected and administered by the local authority, the sheriff, for the sole purpose of holding persons to be delivered to the royal courts for judgment. Sheriffs began establishing jails in the early eleventh century or slightly before.¹⁰ By 1166, Henry II, the powerful Norman king, “enjoined all sheriffs to ensure that in all counties where no gaols existed gaols should now be built.”¹¹

The need for this new institution arose from a great increase in the number of detached persons. At this time, England, along with all of Europe, was moving out of feudalism with its isolated, mostly autonomous fiefdoms. By the late eleventh century Muslim control of the Mediterranean had ended, and trade once again began to connect European populations and to result in the cultivation of urban centers.¹² New towns appeared, and towns grew into cities. European kings began reestablishing and extending their hegemonies. After having remained stable for centuries, the population in most parts of Europe was increasing. At the same time, the feudal system was unraveling. More and more persons were cut loose from the land and from the two basic social organizations of the agricultural society, the family and the tribe.¹³ Henri Pirenne, in tracing the development of the merchant class, describes this well. Speaking of the increase in population, he writes:

It had as a result the detaching from the land [of] an increasingly important number of individuals and committing them to the roving and hazardous existence which, in every agricultural civilization, is the lot of those who no longer find themselves with their roots in the soil. It multiplied the crowd of vagabonds drifting about all through society, living from day to day by alms from the monasteries, hiring themselves out at harvest-time, enlisting in the armies in time of war and holding back from neither rapine nor pillage when occasion presented.¹⁴

Some of the newly uprooted found more or less legitimate means to survive within the changing social order. As feudalism gave way to mercantilism, some new jobs appeared. The ongoing wars, and especially the Crusades, occupied (and killed) many; mendicant religious orders absorbed some; and the recurring plagues eliminated many thousands. Nevertheless, a large portion of the displaced became part of the rabble. Outlaws who lived by robbing, plundering, poaching, and smuggling abounded in the forests and countryside. (The legend of Robin Hood comes from these times.) Disreputable persons filled the towns and the cities. As Urban Tigner Holmes reports:

The ribauz, or good-for-nothings, were always on the edge of a crowd. They begged and plundered at the slightest provocation. They hung around outside the door of the banquet hall when a large feast was held. The king of England had three hundred bailiffs whose duty it was—though not all at one time—to keep these people back as food was moved from the kitchens to the hall, and to see that guests were not disturbed. Frequently in twelfth-century romances a beautiful damsel is threatened with the awful fate of being turned over to the ribauz. Nothing more horrible can be imagined. These people accompanied armies on their expeditions, helping in menial tasks and plundering what was left by the knights and other fighting men.¹⁵

The growth of the rabble had two important influences on the social-control efforts of English rulers. In the first place, it presented them with new social problems to which they responded with increasingly punitive measures, which reached their peak at the end of the eighteenth century with the notorious Grand Assizes and the excessive use of the death penalty.¹⁶ In the second place, it made necessary a drastic increase in the use of imprisonment for detention before trial. Historically, before the number of detached persons grew troublesome, it was considered unnecessary to hold a person before judgment had been passed. With few exceptions, persons were trusted because they were firmly connected to the church, guild, tribe, community, or town; only the occasional unattached person charged with an offense might need some special provision. For example, Alfred the Great, the ninth-century Anglo-Saxon king who stabilized England after the Danish invasions, attempted to ensure the appearance of displaced suspects by attaching them to local citizens:

If such a stranger, merchant, or wayfaring man, came to be suspected of any crime and could not be found, he whose guest he had last been was summoned to account for him. If he had not entertained the stranger for more than two nights, he might clear himself by oath; but if the stranger had lodged with him three nights, he was bound to produce him, or answer, and pay “weregild,” or “wite,” for him, as for one of his own family.¹⁷

However, by the end of the eleventh century the number of detached people milling about the countryside and in the towns had given rise to the use of bail or detention in the newly erected jails. Pugh points out that in the beginning bail was more common than detention: “Attachment followed by release on bail was the method that was first adopted by those officers [sheriffs] in securing the arraignment of offenders and it never fell out of use or even grew uncommon. It seems reasonably clear, however, that, as time went on, actual confinement progressively supplemented attachment and bail as the surer means of attaining the needful aim.”¹⁸ What occurred “as time went on” was that the number of displaced people charged with crimes continued to increase. This was because not only the numbers of the rabble but also the likelihood of their being charged with a crime greatly increased over the next centuries. The English rulers passed more and more laws designed to control the rabble, to stop their incursions on private property, and, when shortages of labor existed, to assign them to low-paid productive work. The vagrancy laws passed between 1349 and 1743 were intended for these purposes.*

The increasing threat attributed to the rabble may be seen in a later statute that prescribes death for “ruffians” who a second time “shall wander, loiter, or idle use themselves and play vagabond.”¹⁹ In the sixteenth century, England introduced the less blatantly cruel and punitive workhouses, called bridewells, to manage and reform the poor.²⁰ By the middle of the eighteenth century, in many counties the “county gaol [was] also a bridewell” and many of the prisoners sentenced to houses of correction, to be engaged in hard labor in order to reform them, were actually idle and were treated the same as the felons and debtors held in the jails.²¹ By the nineteenth century, the bridewells, as well as the poorhouses, had been completely amalgamated with the jails.²²

English colonists brought the tradition of the jail with them to America, but in their first half-century in the New World they did not rely on it very heavily.²³ The early settlers were mostly respectable people—middle class and religious—and the few rabble among them were manageable by expulsion, which was feasible in North America with its vast areas between towns and cities and its open frontier. The few nonrabble offenders were released on bail until adjudication and then fined, publicly shamed, whipped, banished, or, in a few cases, executed. Incarceration was not used.²⁴ During the eighteenth century, however, members of other social classes, including thousands of transported disreputables, many of them convicts, poured in. Many towns and all cities constructed jails. Still, the threat of the rabble was not as great as it was in England, and so these early jails were small and much more humanely managed than England’s. They were patterned after rooming houses, and the prisoners suffered no restrictions other than the confinement.²⁵

At the end of the eighteenth century the problem of managing the growing urban rabble increased, and several eastern cities—notably Philadelphia, New York, and Boston—constructed larger jails, such as Newgate in New York and the Walnut Street jail in Philadelphia. The disreputability and the increased number of prisoners are suggested in the following description of the Walnut Street jail shortly after the Revolutionary War:

It is represented as a scene of promiscuous and unrestricted intercourse, and universal riot and debauchery. There was no separation of color, age or sex, by day or by night; the prisoners lying promiscuously on the floor, most of them without anything like bed or bedding. As soon as the sexes were placed in different wings, which was the first reform made in the prison, of thirty or forty women then confined there, all but four or five immediately left it; it having been a common practice, it is said, for women to cause themselves to be arrested for fictitious debts, that they might share in the orgies of the place. Intoxicating liquours abounded, and indeed were freely sold at a bar kept by one of the officers of the prison.²⁶

After the war Americans began building huge “asylums” to remove, manage, punish, and reform problem populations (most of them the rabble). All cities also built large county and city jails. Although these new jails were smaller versions of the fortresslike asylums (particularly the penitentiaries), no humanitarian theory of reform, no justification through public debate, in fact no plan at all accompanied their development. They were merely “super-secure, fenced, ugly, uncomfortable and unsafe, totally deprived environments.”²⁷ This architectural program has been followed, with a few exceptions, up to the present day.

Later in the nineteenth century, when the smaller towns in the West and Midwest began to be bothered by the detached, transient, and disreputable rabble—mostly drunken miners, trappers, cowboys, and “outlaws”—small jails appeared. The first, which was typical of the type, was “a building of cottonwood two by fours built in the early 1870s. In its narrow confines of six by eighteen feet as many as forty law breakers were kept at one time, largely cowboys who had shown too much exuberance upon reaching town. “²⁸

After the Civil War, as more predatory and violent rabble appeared in the Midwest and West—notably the various bank-robbing and train-robbing gangs that descended from Quantrill’s Guerrillas (a renegade band that operated during and after the Civil War), such as the James brothers, the Youngers, and the Starrs—some towns experimented with more elaborate and secure jails. One example was the “rotary” jail, which had a permanent steel-barred cylinder with an opening on each floor. On the inside of this was another revolving steel-barred cylinder that was divided into pie-shaped cells, each of which had a door opening. Exit was possible only as the cell door rotated to the opening on the outside cylinder.²⁹

By 1900 Americans had taken England’s rabble management invention and modified it to suit their own needs. In particular, in their expanding industrial cities they were ready with large city and county jails to manage the urban rabble, whose numbers and offensiveness were increasing.

Managing the Rabble in the Modern City

Industrialization greatly increased the number of displaced persons, most of whom crowded into the rapidly expanding cities. Fear of the rabble—or “the dangerous classes,” as they were called in the last century—increased proportionately. In speaking of Victorian London, Kellow Chesney locates the object of this fear:

When respectable people spoke of the dangerous classes—a phrase enjoying a good deal of currency—they were not talking about the labouring population as a whole, nor the growing industrial proletariat. Neither were they referring to that minority of politically conscious, mostly “superior” radical working men on whom any sustained working-class political movement ultimately depended. They meant certain classes of people whose very manner of living seemed a challenge to ordered society and the tissue of laws, moralities and taboos holding it together. These “unprincipled,” “ruffianly,” “degraded” elements seemed ready to exploit any breakdown in the established order.³⁰

In the United States, the dangerous classes in the cities were mostly recent immigrants, which added to the fear:

In the poorer quarters of our great cities may be found huddled together the Italian bandit and the bloodthirsty Spaniard, the bad man from Sicily, the Hungarian, the Croatian and the Pole, the Chinaman and the Negro, the cockney Englishman, the Russian and the Jew, with all the centuries of hereditary hate back of them. They continually cross each others’ path. It is no wonder that altercations occur and blood is shed.³¹

Though they vary with time and place, there is great continuity in the social types that constitute “the dangerous classes.” For example, Victorian London had its beggars, “gonophs” (petty thieves), burglars, pickpockets, prostitutes, fences, and gamblers and its waves of itinerant poor that were similar to America’s hobos.³² At a comparable time in its development, around 1900, New York City had all these types as well as its own feared “gangs”—such as the Dead Rabbits, the Bowery Boys, the Eastmans, the Gophers, and the Five Pointers—who stole, fought, and generally terrorized people in and around the Five Points and Hell’s Kitchen districts of lower Manhattan.³³ Urban alcoholic derelicts became a part of the American rabble class after the Civil War. Junkies appeared after the passage of the Harrison Act in 1914 and the shift of opiate addiction to the lower classes.³⁴ Bootleggers and numbers workers were added in eastern cities in the 1920s. Though their styles change from year to year, delinquent gangs of male youths—such as the recent California “lowriders” and the Los Angeles “cholos”—have long been a permanent part of the American urban class.³⁵ America today has a sizable detached and deviant population whose members accumulate in the cities, where their presence in public places offends and threatens conventional people.

The straightforward and punitive measures used in England in the late Middle Ages to control the growing rabble class—such as the statutes that explicitly outlawed rabble status—can no longer be employed. In the mid-nineteenth century, England itself recoiled from the excessively punitive methods used against the lower classes and adopted, in theory at least, a more humanitarian system of penology, which prohibited this type of direct legislation against the rabble. In the United States, the rhetoric of equality and basic human rights has blocked any direct legal approach to controlling the rabble. However, a variety of indirect legal methods have been applied. The “criminalization” of drug and alcohol use was intended to control classes of people as much as to punish deviant behavior of individuals.³⁶ The state and local vagrancy statutes have also been thinly disguised legal assaults against the rabble status.³⁷

Presently, the main systems of control are social segregration and the “peace-keeping” or “watchman” style of police work, which involves the selective use of arrest as well as other discretionary actions, such as verbal commands, threats of arrest, and giving help.³⁸ As Lyn Lofland has pointed out, the strategy of segregation is part of a general development in the industrial city, which itself has a “segregating tendency”: “In many respects, the ideal of the modern city is like the ideal of a well-ordered home: a place for everything and everything in its place.”³⁹ The place for the rabble is in “deviant ghettos,” which Paul Rock compares with the medieval English poor sanctuaries established under the Acts of Settlement:

These acts were designed to enforce immobility upon the poor. People were barred from travel, work, or alien residence. As a kind of shadow parish, sanctuaries and bastard sanctuaries housed the criminal, the debtor, the bankrupt, the pauper, and the eccentric in relatively unpoliced and autonomous areas of geographical and social space. [So, too, in the present] a growing resort to zoning regulation, defensive alliances among residents, the tendency to provide welfare and other provisions in centralized locations, and the economics of housing have worked together to create new sanctuaries. In effect there has been a limited restoration of neo-feudal styles of control. It is unlikely that the new deviant ghettos will be rigorously patrolled unless their populations swamp out over their borders.⁴⁰

On this last point, I take issue. The deviant ghettos are rigorously patrolled. And the primary purpose of this activity is not to enforce the law but rather to keep the peace—which largely means managing the rabble.

Studies of police peace-keeping activities have identified many techniques other than arrest that police officers use to control the rabble both in and out of deviant ghettos.⁴¹ But here we are concerned only with methods that involve arrest.

Containment

Police officers attempt to contain rabble behavior by restricting offensive social types to special neighborhoods and by limiting their deviant activities. The neighborhoods are mainly skid rows, ethnic ghettos, and areas such as San Francisco’s Tenderloin and Manhattan’s Times Square, which contain a great number of disreputable types and the businesses that cater to them, such as bars, cheap hotels, cheap theaters, sex shows, and massage parlors. In a sense, these zones are given over to the rabble, not because it is recognized that the rabble must have a place, but because there is nothing else that can be done with them. In these zones the police have a mandate to reduce the public deviance to an acceptable level, prevent disreputables from preying excessively on one another, and protect reputable persons who pass through or have business there. As one officer said: “We have girls going to work at the Telephone Company here. They have to walk through this area. We have to provide them with an area they can walk through.”⁴²

Police officers will arrest disreputables in these zones for acting in ways that exceed the police officers’ conception of the zone’s behavioral limits. This conception is based on unstated, unwritten discretionary standards, which are part of the police officers’ working culture and are learned mostly on the job.* Many violations of these discretionary standards are, at most, very petty crimes, and sometimes they consist of nothing more than disobeying an officer’s commands or in some other way challenging his authority—and in these zones maintaining authority is an important issue with police. In this study my research assistant and I randomly selected 100 persons arrested for felonies in San Francisco and then interviewed them and reviewed their booking and court records. In twenty-five cases, the persons were engaged in very petty crimes (or no crime at all), but they behaved in ways that apparently exceeded the standards of the rabble zone. Here are a few examples of such behavior, taken from the interviews or from the booking reports of the arresting officer.

A young black male got into a fight with his sister in their home in one of the city’s ethnic ghettos. She called the police and told them that he had hit her with a stick. He claimed that he had not: “I have witnesses that say I didn’t touch her.” The police believed her version and arrested him.

A young white male described his arrest to me: “I was standing outside a door and the landlady called the police. I was bleeding. I had just been beat up. When they came, they searched me and found some pills. They were nice to me. Took me to get some stitches and then brought me to jail.”

In another example, the arresting officers described the arrest in their booking report:

While on patrol in the area [an ethnic ghetto] I observed E. to be walking from corner to corner with no apparent business. As I observed him further to walk [north bound] on Octavia from Hayes, I entered the radio car, at which time E. took a cigarette package out of his pocket, and threw it onto the stairs of [street number] Octavia, at which time two tablets fell out of the package. Further look at the package produced 24 more white tablets, possibly codeine No. 4. E. was taken into custody and booked.

In trying to keep the zone’s public deviant behavior within tolerable limits, police officers watch particular persons and particular types, such as petty hustlers. Three of the arrests in the felony sample were of persons that the police officers knew and defined as potential troublemakers. One of them said: “I was walking down the street through the Tenderloin with some friends. A cop pulls up and says, ‘you’re drunk.’ He grabbed me and we scuffled. I fell down. The cop accused me of trying to steal his gun. It was a set-up. They did the same thing to me a year ago. They’re just trying to get my probation revoked.”

Six arrests were of petty hustlers who sold drugs in San Francisco’s Tenderloin or the South of Market skid row. One member of this group said in an interview: “I was walking down Market Street talking to a friend. Two undercover cops thought I was talking to them [instead of his friend], trying to sell them some weed. They arrested me for possession for sale. It wasn’t weed; it was tobacco and herbs.”

Two arrests were of Cubans, a group the police see as troublemakers and criminals. In an interview, one Cuban explained (in Spanish) that he had been standing with a friend on the corner of Twentieth and Mission (in the heart of the Latino neighborhood) when the police pulled up to them. He said he did not know what they said because he cannot speak English. They arrested him and his friend for felony assault. (Two days later the charges were dismissed.)

In the rabble zones disreputables often prey on other disreputables, and police officers make arrests to protect the disreputable victims. This apparently was the case in eight of the arrests in our sample. As one man said in his interview: “Me and my ole lady were having an argument on the street. We had been drinking and walking around [in the Tenderloin]. She stepped out in the street and flagged down a police car and told them I had hit her and was trying to rape her.” (The charges were dropped three days later.)

Some neighborhoods in San Francisco are “contested zones,” areas that the rabble want to use and the police want to clean up. In these contested sections, police enforce stringent standards against the disreputables. Seven of the arrests made in contested zones were for behavior by disreputables that probably would have been tolerated in rabble zones. For example: “I was walking through the Haight [a zone that is rising out of its mid-1970s depths as a hippie skid row], and a police officer came up to me and asked if I could get him some drugs. I knew he was a cop. Then he wanted me to work for him, turn in people I knew who were dealing. I wouldn’t, so they busted me.” (The charges were dropped by “order of the court” when this man appeared at arraignment.)

Another example: “I was sitting on the steps at Walgreen’s on Polk Street [a contested neighborhood] drinking vodka. The police came up to me and told me to pour it out. Then they searched me and found some grass on me. It was less than an ounce. They arrested me for possession for sale.” (The charges were reduced in court to a misdemeanor and the man fined $100.)

When police see disreputables in respectable neighborhoods, they watch them closely and apply very strict standards. In our sample of 100, thirteen rabble types were arrested in respectable neighborhoods for committing acts that probably would have been ignored if they had occurred in rabble zones or if reputable people had committed them. One of the thirteen reported: “I was riding around with a friend and his car broke down. He got out to fix it, and across the street some guy ran away from an open car. We went over to look at it and were looking in the window when the cops pulled up. They arrested us for burglary.” (The charge was dismissed the next day.)

Raids

In addition to containing deviance within rabble zones and acceptable limits, police officers, particularly members of the vice squad, make raids into the zone to arrest particular individuals or types of disreputables. Raiding Tenderloin hotel rooms and apartments to capture persons involved in drugs is the most common form of raid in San Francisco. Nine of the felony arrests in our sample were apparently the result of raids. For example, one interviewee said: “We were in our room in a hotel on Eddy Street [in the Tenderloin] and the cops came busting in the door. They were undercover narcotics agents. They started hassling everyone. There were a lot of drugs in the room. They arrested everyone. They told me, ‘We’re sending you back to San Quentin.’”

Another common form of raid depends upon the use of “plants” to catch petty thieves on the street. A booking report read:

On Tuesday 11–17-81 at 13:15 hrs. Lieutenant B. strolled east on Market Street. Lt. B. feigned the appearance of an elderly pensioner, and in his right rear pants pocket was a tan envelope containing $2.00. Lt. B. stopped and looked eastward when R. approached Lt. B. and took the tan envelope out of the pocket. R. was arrested by Sergeant W. and transported to the Hall of Justice where he was booked on the above charge.

Sweeps

Occasionally the police set out to round up an entire category of rabble in order to clean up the streets in an area. For example, the Las Vegas police went after street prostitutes in March 1981. “Almost 300 prostitutes were arrested and taken to jail during the first 48 hours of a police crack-down on Las Vegas Strip prostitution, Assistant Sheriff Jere Vanek said yesterday. . . . ‘The street hookers are offensive, have no tact, no finesse, they get into fistfights over turf.’”⁴³

In Miami in October 1982 the police swept the streets of derelicts before the arrival of a convention of travel agents. A newspaper reported:

Like an anxious hostess sweeping dirt under the rug, Miami is whisking its unwanted derelicts into jail and out of sight of a convention of 6,000 travel agents. Police are cramming Dade County’s jails with hundreds of derelicts, apparently in hopes that American Society of Travel Agents conventioneers will return home and recommend Miami to their clients. “This is a one-week clean sweep strictly for ASTA. We wouldn’t be doing this under normal conditions,” Officer Luis Alvarez said yesterday.⁴⁴

Although sweeps generally produce misdemeanor arrests, three of the persons in our sample arrested for felonies were apparently caught in sweeps. One of them said: “I was in a parking lot on Mission Street and the police came in with a paddy wagon. They were picking up lowriders. They got me for being high on drugs and for possession of stolen property.” (The charges were dropped three days later.)

Helping rabble

Some arrests of disreputables are intended as a form of aid. Police officers are among the few—and are sometimes the only—social agents available to the rabble. As Jacqueline Wiseman has written: “The peace-keeping on the Row can be said to be at least secondarily for the benefit of residents, but more in the manner of the parent who disciplines a child for his own good. Most police consider a drunk arrest to be somewhat benevolent.”⁴⁵ Arrests of this sort are invariably made on misdemeanor charges. In our sample, some of the misdemeanor drunk arrests may have been “for the benefit of the resident,” but none of the felony arrests appeared to be for the purpose of extending aid.

Fighting property crime by rabble

One of the most troublesome activities of the rabble class, which the police make a constant effort to stop, is its persistent assault on the private property of respectable citizens. Fifteen of our 100 felony arrests were of disreputables for stealing property from reputable people or businesses. Here are two examples from police reports:

Received a call via radio re: an 852 in progress [theft from auto] in the 2800 block of Jackson Street [a highly respectable neighborhood]. As we drove in front of [street number] Jackson, Officer Q. and I observed the above boosted vehicle parked inside the garage area of [street number] Jackson. The door to this garage was open partially and we were able to see the garage area. We saw M. in the front seat area, and suspect no. 2 standing next to the right-side open door of the boosted vehicle. Custody of M. was turned over to 3F30 day watch.

Victim/reportee L. told me that while he was standing outside of Studio West dance hall, he engaged in a conversation with suspect no. 1. Suspect no. 1 informed him that a friend of his, suspect no. 3, a white female, was without a date and asked him if he’d accompany them and be her escort. Suspect no. 1 opened the passenger door, where L. sat. L. looked up at him and saw what he described as a .38 revolver pistol in the suspect’s hand pointing at him. The suspect then said, “Give me your money.” L. complied; fearing for his life. L. handed suspect no. 1 his wallet. Suspect no. 1 then told L. to leave the keys to his vehicle and get out. As L. hesitated at this command, suspect no. 1 kicked him in the face.

Finally, nine of the felony arrests in our sample seem unrelated to managing the rabble. The behavior in question—which ranged from first-degree murder to possession of cocaine discovered during a drunk-driving arrest—would probably have provoked arrest regardless of who had committed it.

Conclusions

By arguing that arrest procedures and the jail are used mainly to manage the rabble, I do not mean to imply that crime is not an issue. As the foregoing partial review and classification of the 100 felony arrests suggests, the majority of those arrested were in fact guilty of some crime. Rather, I would like to emphasize that the culpability of those persons had what Egon Bittner has called “restricted relevance.”⁴⁶ That is, they violated standards that are enforced with a great deal of discretion by the police and mainly in order to manage the rabble rather than to enforce the law.

Some of the more serious crimes, such as robbery and assault by one disreputable on another, usually come to the attention of the police because of the social setting and the status of the disreputables. Disreputables commit their crimes in a much more obvious fashion than reputable people, and the police, in performing their rabble management function, are keeping their eye on them and expecting them to commit crimes. Police do overlook a lot of criminal conduct by disreputables. However, disreputables commit an enormous amount of petty crime out in the open, and the police see a great deal of it.

Likewise, when disreputables are arrested for violating the private property rights of respectable citizens, it is because the police are at least as interested in managing the rabble as in enforcing the law. It is not simply the fact of theft that provokes arrest; it is who commits the theft and what type of theft it is. Our society—like its predecessors, chiefly England—has been quicker to criminalize covetous property accumulation by the rabble than by other classes. The police are always on the lookout for purse-snatching, theft from cars, and shoplifting, but they almost never patrol used-car lots or automobile repair shops to catch salesmen or repairmen breaking the law, and they never raid corporate board rooms to catch executives fixing prices. The difference between these crimes is not seriousness or prevalence; it is offensiveness, which is determined by social status and context.

*Caleb Foote, who studied the abuses of vagrancy statutes, interprets these laws:

The anti-migratory policy behind vagrancy legislation began as an essential complement of the wage stabilization legislation which accompanied the breakup of feudalism and the depopulation caused by the Black Death. By the Statutes of Labourers in 1349–1351, every able-bodied person without other means of support was required to work for wages fixed at the level preceding the Black Death; it was unlawful to accept more, or to refuse an offer to work, or to flee from one county to another to avoid offers of work or to seek higher wages, or to give alms to able-bodied beggars who refused to work. (Foote, “Vagrancy Type Law and Its Administration,” p. 615)

*Though the limits vary from time to time and officer to officer, in a particular period officers tend to agree on them. For a discussion of the working knowledge of police officers, see Egon Bittner, “The Police on Skid-Row: A Study of Peace Keeping.”