• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

p

The clauses about what to wear and to eat, and the clause about “servile” labor, were repealed in April 1795.71

q

South Carolina kept, indeed, the old colonial system of “prison bounds.” Some prisoners were allowed to leave the jail, provided they did not go too far, and provided they came back to their cells at night. Most misdemeanor convicts had this privilege by the 1830s; hence, a worker could keep his job, despite trouble with the law. A statute of 1828 extended the “Gaol bounds” for Charleston: on the west, the river at low-water mark; on the south, the south line of Broad Street; on the east, the east line of Meeting Street; on the north, the north line of Wentworth Street. A law of 1831 for the “Judicial District of Georgetown” extended the “prison bounds to the corporate limits of the town.”86

r

For this reason, too, the law discouraged slave-owners from setting free their slaves and hedged manumission with all sorts of restrictions.8

s

On the work of the Klan, see chapter 8.

t

An interesting aspect of the case was Plessy’s claim that he was not really black; that he was in fact an “octoroon,” and the “mixture of colored blood” was “not discernible” in him. The Supreme Court, on this issue, said it would simply defer to state law.

u

See chapter 8.

v

The Chinese wore their hair in braided queues, and the mayor and other San Franciscans believed that this custom had some sort of religious significance. Forcing Chinese prisoners to cut their hair, then, would be a terrific insult, and humiliate them before their countrymen. Whether this was actually so is not at all clear.66 t This refers to the old nickname for China, the Celestial Empire.

w

A penalty can be stiffened in two ways: by adding severity, which means jacking up a fine, say, from $100 to $200; or increasing the jail sentence for some act; or by adding certainty, that is, catching a higher percentage of violators, perhaps through putting more muscle into the enforcement effort.

x

See chapter 14, below.

y

There are other categories as well, which we often find in classifications of crime; for example, regulatory crimes and crimes against public order.

z

A few statutes were a bit more explicit. In late nineteenth-century Ohio, the crime of sodomy was defined as “carnal copulation in any opening of the body, except sexual parts, with another human being, or with a beast.” The punishment was confinement in the penitentiary, for not more than twenty years.4

aa

Anthony Comstock, the famous bluenose, who campaigned tirelessly against obscenity, waged war on “the undraped female figure” in art. He explained his point of view as follows: “No one reveres the female form more than I do. In my opinion there is nothing else in the world so beautiful as the form of a beautiful maiden.... But the place for a woman’s body to be—denuded—is in the privacy of her own apartment with the blinds drawn.”15

ab

See chapter 15.

ac

Yet surprisingly few prisoners went to jail because of gambling or lottery offenses—at least according to the 1880 census. The figures are fifty and ten, respectively.44

ad

See chapter 15.

ae

Thus, in the trial of one Lawrence Pienovi, “for biting off his wife’s nose,” in New York, 1818, the mayor of New York told the jury that the law does not regard “every slight degree of insanity—every trivial aberration from reason ... as a defence.” rather, the defense must be based on a “deep and total dementation ... such as involves an inability to discriminate between right and wrong.”78

af

A minor incident, reported in San Diego in 1896, is suggestive. A young man, John B. Postema, was indicted for grand larceny: he stole a team of horses and a carriage. Postema’s behavior was extremely peculiar. He could not stop laughing. He laughed “when he got up,” and also “when he lay down to sleep—laugh, laugh, laugh.” Sometimes, he even laughed in his sleep, in “one of the gloomy steel cells of the county jail.” Finally, the sheriff called the county physician, Dr. Gochenauer, to examine the hysterical