Vagrancy

Following the withdrawal of federal power at the end of Reconstruction in 1877, blacks found life to be increasingly difficult as their progress was continuously thwarted by unjustified prejudice and the racism that remained rampant throughout the 1930s. While the federal government previously sought to rebuild and repair the divide between black and white people, Post-Reconstruction oversaw atrocities and the marginalization of blacks, which reflected the notion of white supremacy. Consequences…

point to some specific examples of the black codes. The black codes that were most atrocious to him were those that regarded vagrancy and apprenticeship. The vagrancy codes punished African Americans who were unemployed and homeless. If an African American desired to leave his plantation to seek new employment, he could not do so without the risk of being convicted of vagrancy and punished severely. Under the apprenticeship law, African American minors would be taken away from their homes…

time, some sections of the document seem to be beneficial to all. This first law in the document, the Apprentice Law, was made to apprentice orphans to masters. This gave orphans a home, but it probably wasn’t always a good home. The next law, the Vagrancy Law, made it so that former slaves who are unemployed were fined and went to jail. The law also prohibited gambling and prostitution. Next it was the Civil Rights of Freedmen. This law gave rights such as marriage between the same races and to…

Americans. Racial prejudice was very well alive, and devious forms of forced labor emerged greatly in the North American South. 2. The “Pig Laws” unlawfully punished poor African American’s by penalizing them for crimes, like stealing a farm animal. Vagrancy codes criminalized and targeted African American’s by making it a crime to be unemployed. The rise of the convict leasing become popular because there was an issue of where and how to house the convicts. I believe that there no laws that…

In order to force blacks into the hands of whites in need of cheap labor, they created the vagrancy law. The vagrancy law made it illegal for a person of color to be unemployed. If they were caught they could be thrown in prison and sentenced harsh time along with expensive fines. As an alternative option, instead of residing in prison white masters would…

In 1938 the Public Health Services in Guatemala published the Regulation of the Department of Sexual Prophylaxis and Venereal Disease, this manual provided policies that “open[ed] up horizons of moralizing and personal support” to regulate the “sexual problem” of commercial sex workers in Guatemala. This Public Health campaign ran parallel to the urbanization of Guatemala’s rural landscape during the 1930s and 1940s. Guatemala’s commercial sex workers were usually among the working class that…

The myth of black criminality began in Antebellum America when vagrancy laws began and different punishments due to race were enforced. The text says “Antebellum Virginia had 73 crimes that could garner the death penalty for slaves- and only one for whites.” Many people judge the severity of the crime by punishment that is handed down. This would make most white Americans in the Antebellum time period view African Americans as more dangerous. The myth of black criminality has not only been…

the harm it was doing to their communities. “There is no drug exception written into the text of the constitution”(Alexander, p.61), yet it was, and continues to be, the leading factor in sending individuals to jail. Minor crimes like loitering and vagrancy laws were the issues of back then, while today minor criminal offenses like possession of marijuana tend to lead to arrest and conviction. “In 2005 four out of five drug arrests were for possession of minor drugs, and one out of five were for…

criminals, what is to be done with the women who were guilty of more serious crimes and needed more excessive consequences? Should they receive the same treatment as other women whom were wrongly convicted or guilty of smaller crimes such as theft and vagrancy? Should they even be placed in the TWC or should they return to the regular Toronto Police Court? Those are all questions that Margaret Patterson, member of the TLCW and the first female Magistrate of the court, looked to…

situation. In the late nineteenth century, the introduction of the convict lease system by state governments marked a significant lack of political progress for African Americans due to rampant corruption. In The Piano Lesson, when Lymon is arrested for vagrancy, Mr. Stovall, pays his prison fees so that he must “work for him to pay him back his hundred dollars” despite the fact that Lymon would “rather take [his]…