The Jail. John Irwin
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