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[...] In August 1819, tens of thousands of people gathered in central Manchester, only to have the rally declared illegal. A cavalry charge with sabers killed a dozen protestors and injured several hundred more. In response, the British state developed a series of vagrancy laws designed to force people into “productive” work. What was needed was a force that could both maintain political control and help produce a new economic order of industrial capitalism. As home secretary, Peel created the London Metropolitan Police to do this. The main functions of the new police, despite their claims of political neutrality, were to protect property, quell riots, put down strikes and other industrial actions, and produce a disciplined industrial work force. This system was expanded throughout England, which was awash in movements against industrialization. [...]
America’s changing economic realities have played a central role in this process as well. Christian Parenti has shown how the federal government crashed the economy in the 1970s to stem the rise of workers’ power, leaving millions out of work and creating a new, mostly African American permanent underclass largely excluded from the formal economy. In response, government mobilized at all levels to manage this new “surplus population” through intensive policing and mass incarceration. The policing of poor and nonwhite communities became much more intense. As unemployment, poverty, and homelessness increased, government, police, and prosecutors worked together to criminalize huge swaths of the population aided by ideologies like the broken-windows theory and the superpredator myth.
simplistic but still compelling as a narrative
Even if criminalization was successful, legal, and cost effective, it would still be unethical. We live in an economic and social environment in which the market is unable to house people at the bottom of the economic order and government is unwilling to make up the difference. Given this reality, how can we justify treating homelessness as a criminal justice issue? The law appears to be applied universally, but this fails to take into account the fact that the poor are always under greater pressure to break it and at greater risk of being subjected to legal action. As Anatole France pointed out in 1894, “In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread.”
timeless quote lol
Internationally, these groups often work with local authorities to do large brothel raids, in which foreign workers are deported to their home countries and local workers are forced into social services and training programs. Sometimes these “rescued” women are willing participants in sex work and fight to escape. Others are forced into sweatshop-like conditions, primarily in extremely low-paid garment work. In Thailand, women are held for a year in rehabilitation camps, where they are required to learn sewing and other trades in hopes that they will accept low-wage work instead of much higher-paying sex work. The sex workers’ rights group Empower Chiang Mai has documented numerous incidents in which “rescued” sex workers were abused by police, held in detention, and deported. Needless to say, many of those “saved” return to sex work.
By 1990, fifty thousand people had been arrested in such sweeps. Current LAPD chief Charlie Beck points out that these sweeps “undermined the moral authority of the police.” Gang members may have been a source of problems in these communities, but they were still a part of them. They had mothers, cousins, uncles, and friends who viewed the sweeps as the arbitrary, abusive, and disproportionate actions of an occupying army. Many became more sympathetic toward gangs and the young people facing the brunt of this enforcement activity. All the while, crime rates continued to go up—as did excessive-force lawsuits against the police. [...]
Until the late nineteenth century, the US had no formal immigration restrictions. The border was essentially open, with only customs controls directed at shipping. In 1882, after 200,000 Chinese laborers immigrated to build the railroads and perform farm labor in the West, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to prohibit their further immigration. Much of the language used in debating the act was explicitly racist and consistent with local bans on the right of Chinese people to own property and appear as witnesses in court.1 Proponents referred to Chinese immigrants as a “Mongolian horde” and “Johnny Chinaman” and accused them of being immoral and lazy. Small informal units were mobilized to limit unauthorized entry of Chinese immigrants, mostly along California’s border with Mexico. The only restrictions on white immigration during this period banned those who were criminals, infirm, or politically radical. Anarchists were specifically banned in 1903, with Italians targeted for particular scrutiny.
In a thousand novels of love-in-the-Western-world the progress of feeling between a woman of intelligence and a man of will is charted through a struggle that concludes itself when the woman at last melts into romantic longing and the deeper need for union. There are, however, a handful of remarkable novels written late in the last century and early in this one -- among them Daniel Deronda, The House of Mirth, Diana of the Crossways, Mrs. Dalloway -- where, at the exact moment the woman should melt, her heart unexpectedly hardens. Just at this place where give is required, some flat cold inner remove seems to overtake the female protagonist. In the eyes of the world she becomes opaque ("unnatural" she is called), but we, the privileged readers, know what is happening. The woman has taken a long look down the road of her future. What she sees repels. She cannot "imagine" herself in what lies ahead. Unable to imagine herself, she now thinks she cannot act the part. She will no longer be able to make the motions. The marriage will be a charade. In that moment of clear sight sentimental love, for her, becomes a thing of the past. Which is not to say the marriage will not take place; half the time it will. It is only to say that in these novels this is the point at which the story begins.
<3
[...] Diana's husband feels the sting of her independence. He broods on it, then falls into a rage, brings suit against her, naming the MP as corespondent. But he cannot prove his case. The Warwicks separate and, with her reputation barely intact, Diana sets herself up as a political hostess and begins writing novels and articles to make a living. Soon her books are being reviewed, and every MP in town wants to have dinner at Diana's.
She blossoms into a glorious creature. Her mind grows tough, honest, wise, her speech witty, her insights luminous. She is unsentimental. She takes in her own experience. After the separation, alone for the first time, in ''lodgings," Diana receives her friend Lady Emma, who is appalled, and asks if she can really like this. Diana replies, "I do. Yes, I can eat when I like, walk, work -- and I am working! My legs and my pen demand it. Let me be independent! Besides, I begin to learn something of the bigger world outside the one I know, and I crush my mincing tastes. In return for that, I get a sense of strength I had not when I was a drawing room exotic. Much is repulsive. But I am taken with a passion for reality!"
<3
As Diana's intelligence strengthens it takes in ever harder truths. She begins to see that her independence is intimately related to the clarity of her thought, and she comes to believe that the increasing goodness of her mind is linked to passions held in check. Passionate feeling, she is persuaded, is the undoing of a woman's independence. Diana gazes with a cold, clear eye -- remarkably cold -- at her calculation of life's cost. In London it is said of her that she is cold by nature. We, too, see her as cold, but not by nature.
i am always wondering about this
[...] She'd rather place herself on the other side of the law (their law) than become a prisoner of her own weakest self. She will be vile but she will be free. Free to enter herself. Love, she knows, is not the way in. Into herself is through the mind, not through the senses. That is what freedom means to Diana.
She is wrong, of course. She will not be free. Free is not through the working mind or the gratified senses; free is through the steady application of self-understanding. Diana is too angry and too frightened to be free. In her panic she savages Percy and deforms herself. Like an animal in a frenzy, she tears loose of the trap, leaving behind a limb. For the rest of her life she will lick a wound covered over by scar tissue. Courage she has in great measure; it is self-knowledge she lacks.
whoa