Virginia Policy Review, Volume XIV Issue I

Virginia Policy Review 1 The Shortcuts Made in Crises: Slow Killers of American Liberty

By Jasmine Rangel September 11, 2001 signaled a transformative point for the United States in terms of what actions the citizenry considered viable to protect their civil liberties and civil rights. While the nation was in mourning and confused about the future, Congress passed one of the first pieces of legislation that would undermine these central tenets of American values. The Patriot Act gave, and continues to give, the federal government the authority to subjectively police the bodies of people that are deemed suspicious (ACLU, 2002). However, the Patriot Act is only an accumulation of existing policies that unjustly police the activities, skin color, and choices of individuals who do not appropriately fit into the existing ideals of a community at that time. In fact, this is a very typical pattern from policy and decision makers during times of confusion, fear, and crisis. Laws that date back to the 1800s have been pervading public life and dictating what and who can acceptably take up space, engage with others in public, or simply exist in areas supposedly deemed for everyone. Specifically, the new surveillance state has catalyzed into an entity that is slowly corroding the ability for Black and brown Americans to truly possess civil liberties and rights that are inherently theirs and demands a proper intervention from leadership.

In the United States, there have been various laws and policies that have endorsed the policing of public spaces. Public spaces are a critical part of public life and provide an endless number of benefits to societal cohesion, community growth, and civic life (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 2017). However, policies that survey the public have demonstrated that the individuals most likely to receive the brunt end of the consequences for infringing on these rules speaks more to the law’s true intentions than the actions of these individuals.

Vagrancy Laws Vagrancy laws criminalized “vagrants,” or homeless, poor, beggar, and transient individuals, for certain activities executed in public spaces. Specifically, vagrancy laws tended to focus on restricting the movement of impoverished individuals who were possibly in search of work so that they did not become reliant on local aid (O'BrassillKulfan, 2019). Vagrancy laws were originally implemented in 16th Century England as a way to maintain the social hierarchy (Goluboff, 2016). In the United States, vagrancy laws in some southern states like Virginia, were implemented right after the end of the Civil War while thousands of newly freed slaves travelled across the nation looking for work (Tarter, 2015). In places like Virginia, vagrancy laws forced those who seemed to lack financial capital or a place to live back into ball and chain, uncompensated labor.

Virginia’s Commanding General Alfred H. Terry refused to enforce the law, protesting that it would bring back “slavery in all but its name.” (Tarter, 2015, para.1).

In northern cities, vagrancy laws continued to persecute people with different lifestyles or financial circumstances unfamiliar to most of society at that time. By the 1840s, New York’s vagrancy laws policed nearly fifty thousand New York City inhabitants (O'Brassill-Kulfan, 2019). Meanwhile, in Philadelphia, many individuals