Social Controls: Applying the Conflict Perspective to a Study of Law

Social Controls: Applying the Conflict Perspective to a Study of Law

Introduction

Efforts to confront vagrancy are not new, and the challenges faced today are present in many American cities—with the tension between law enforcement and proponents of public order on the one hand, and homeless people, their advocates, and civil libertarians on the other. The purpose of this paper is to elaborate on the article named, 'A Sociological Analysis of the Law of Vagrancy', which has been written by William Chambliss. Moreover, the paper includes a brief account of the aspects which have influences my personal opinions about the pluralist consensus and the conflict models of law and legal systems. In addition, a brief account of this influence on my beliefs about the America's criminal justice system and the concept of justice within that system have also been included.

Discussion

By the mid-17th century, workhouses and “houses of correction” had been erected throughout the American colonies to punish lazy (or recalcitrant) servants or beggars who were deemed capable of work but unwilling to do so. Settlement laws, which forbade the granting of relief to anyone who could not show that they were born in the place where they sought aid, were enforced with the practice of warning out—expelling the nonresident poor from the town and sending them back to the place of their birth to seek aid (in some locales, after a brutal public whipping) (Chambliss, 1972).

A new surge in vagrancy occurred in the mid-1800s as foreign immigration, migration to the cities, urbanization, and industrialization began to take hold in the United States, and many immigrants found themselves dependent upon the labor market without land to sustain them. There were great new opportunities in the cities, but great risk as well, for once a man found himself unemployed there, he was unmoored. One of the early functions of the judicial system was to serve as temporary lodging houses for transient and vagrant men. Settlement laws remained common in the western states and territories throughout the 19th century, as were vagrancy laws that targeted “healthy beggars” or “persons who roam about from place to place without any lawful business.” Vagrants were assumed to be unwilling to work, or to be alcoholics; laws often failed to account for those whose occupations required them to travel (for example, whalers and other seamen, and later, railway ...