The Vagrancy Problem.: The Case for Measures of Restraint for Tramps, Loafers, and Unemployables: With a Study of Continental Detention Colonies and Labour HousesDawson, William Harbutt
History
The Vagrancy Problem.: The Case for Measures of Restraint for Tramps, Loafers, and Unemployables: With a Study of Continental Detention Colonies and Labour Houses
Dawson, William Harbutt
Poor laws; Poor laws -- Great Britain; Tramps; Unemployed
To the Poor Law and to Poor Law institutions people of these classes
emphatically do not belong, and all past failure to make the slightest
impression upon them is in my opinion primarily due to the persistent
mistake of treating their case as coming under the law of public
charity--a mistake which is also a wrong so long as the idle poor are
maintained, in any degree whatsoever, at the expense of the industrious
poor.
The practical measures which would be needful are these.
(1) In the first place, let loafing of every kind, and not merely the
loafing of the casual pauper, be made a misdemeanour. For if we begin
to exterminate the idler of the highway, we must, in fairness, deal
with his kinsman of the street and of the workhouse.
(2) In sympathy with this measure, restrict the right of free migration
in the case of the destitute unemployed to the extent of making it
dependent on permission to travel in search of work. (The man with
money in his pocket is his own master all the world over.)
(3) Further, and particularly, abolish the casual ward, as we
logically must do. This may seem a strong measure, but so far as the
tramp is concerned, it is really the fulcrum on which the lever of
reformation must rest. "The why is plain as way to parish church." If
vagabondage is to be regarded as an offence to be punished instead
of an innocent weakness (which it never was and never can be) to be
humoured, then the vagrant's free lodging-house must disappear.
It is obvious that so long as we maintain wayside shelters for the
special reception of tramps, it will be hopeless to repress vagrancy.
The casual ward invites vagrants and creates them. Moreover, it is
entirely incompatible with the laws which already exist for the nominal
repression of vagrancy. It is illegal to beg, it is illegal to wander
about without means of subsistence, but there is no habitual vagrant
living who is not guilty of this compound fracture of the law, and
few who have not been punished for it. Nevertheless, we wink at these
misdemeanours, and in housing some 10,000 vagrants every night in the
casual wards, we offer direct encouragement to known law-breakers to
persist in illegality.
(4) But at these negative and repressive measures it will be impossible
to stop. Their very operation would compel us to go further, for the
tramp and the loafer having been hustled from their wonted haunts, and
the casual ward having been shut in their faces, they would either have
to betake themselves to honest work, or they would fall into the hands
of the police, either as mendicants or homeless wanderers.
Here is seen the need for a new departure in our penal system. At
present no correctional institutions exist suited to offenders whose
radical fault is constitutional idleness. Discipline, enforced by
all necessary use of compulsion, is their principal need, and this
discipline can only be given in special institutions.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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