Constraining my remarks to that period of time and well be asking the question of what is it like to be arrested during these times in history . An arrest is a simple thing, right . It seems like a simple thing. There are few necessary elements to making something an arrest. The person making the arrest has to be a representative of the state. They must accuse a person of knitting an offense against the community. They must move them from the place within to a place without the community, after making their arrest. So it seems like a fairly simple process. Yet, were absolutely fascinated with the scene of the arrest. And this suggests that there is something more to the arrest that we want to understand. Headlines about arrests always have grabbed attention. These are just several of the headlines that a came through from the 20th century, headlines about arrests. There are thousands and thousands of headlines about arrests. We are all familiar with them from our daily newspapers and just think how many Police Procedurals we watch today. It seems like even reading about an arrest in the newspaper or watching accounts of arrests on television news, the many different ways we hear about arrests, thats not enough. We also have to watch dramatic representations of arrests, right . A whole bunch of different ways. Hear music about arrests. Arrests seem to be very central to our culture and there is nothing new about that. Some of these will be familiar to you guys. I think were probably, im guessing, the thing that were familiar with is dragnet, right . Basically it goes all the way back into plays and, you know, cheap fiction published in the mid to late 19th century. A lot of that was theme of the importance of an arrest. One thing thats struck me, if youre very familiar with arrests from reallife, even if you, yourself, have been arrested, you still spend a lot of time wanting to hear about, read about and watch other people being arrested or fictional accounts of other people being arrested. We talked about this in class a lot of people who are incarcerated spend a lot of time consuming popular cultural accounts of the criminal Justice System including a lot of arrests. So the arrests are important in our culture and it has been since our nations beginnings, even. It is both a practical act, the arrest or the threat of an arrest is one of the most direct concrete physical ways that a government can try to shape our behavior as citizens. An arrest is also a ritualistic act. Its an act with sort of a heavy meaning beyond a practical meaning. Its a way that agents of the government can mark what behaviors and what circumstances, by what people are outside of the community and unacceptable. More directly than anything else, the possibility of the arrest has been how the state has controlled the behavior of people within the United States. Our nation was founded with a profound understanding of the centrality of the process of arrest to our political system. Four out of 10 of the amendments to our constitution and the bill of rights are about the rights of people who are accused of crimes, right . Including the rights related to when do people have the right to take you. When do people have the right to arrest you . The founders were convinced that who the nation chose to arrest and how they made and executed that decision was one of the most important issues for the health of our country. And yet, historians have rarely spent a lot of time exploring the history of the arrest and how to what extent historians have it stays the same and to what extent it changes over time. When they have done so, they have rarely done so from the perspective of the people most immediately involved in the arrest. Actually, we dont know very much about what Police Officers thought and how they understood what they were doing when they were making arrests. There has been too little work done on that question. But we also dont have very much information at all, very much analysis at all about people who were arrested experienced that moment of arrest, which is both a practical moment, and a moment of rituals. Most of us agree and here, sometimes it has been good and necessary for the police to arrest people. It is important to keep that as an open question in our mind, because what are the alternatives. Most of us also agree that people have sometimes been arrested for the wrong reasons and in wrong ways. And for reasons other than simply protecting other people and their property. Most of us are well aware that policing has often been largely about maintaining social order. What they used to call keeping the peace, right . As much as its been about protecting, stopping violent or exploitive behavior. Were aware that often arrests have heightened, have increased in response to social unrest. When there has been major strikes, labor strikes, particularly earlier in the century. Moments of demands for justice from certain oppressed Minority Groups, right . Largely africanamericans, in our country. But we know that order is often in the eyes of the beholder, and so policing has sometimes had a political content as well as an anticrime function. I think thats something that people would broadly agree with. And i think the broader significance of the arrest is why we all find it so fascinating. We have to keep looking at it again and again and again. Every day thousands of arrests are constantly drawing a border around what Authority Figures imagine to be the community. Revealing who is inside and who is outside of the law, or the orderly community. Who is allowed to participate and who must be removed from view . So lets look now at what it appears as, when we observe the border being drawn. So this class is going to approach this question of the arrest from the perspective of the arrestee. On another occasion ill explore the perspective of Police Officers. But here im going to talk about the perspective of the arrestee. Were looking at the arrest from the perspective of the person being arrested. We can see three very different moments of arrests. From different periods of time. We see a Violent Arrest at a protest. We see, this is a woman being arrested for street walking, and we see a guy who is arrested for going on a highspeed chase, misbehaving, trying to evade arrest after a night of drinking. You can see that the three people being arrested are being treated in very different ways, having very different kinds of experiences, for a whole bunch of different reasons. Policing has evolved in a lot of practical ways that shape what arrests look like and felt like. I will stop here we go. Lets start figuring out what the arrest is by looking at what it does and what it has done. How has the experience of being arrested changed from the 1880sthrough 2001 . And how did it remain the same . Were going to organize this, that top left hand picture, it almost looks like its a fake group of police, but, i got it from a very reputable source and i think maybe they just look like that. Different kinds of police in different eras. Were going to ask five different questions. Were going to go through them in order. Well first ask, who was likely to be arrested during this period . Second, what were people arrested for . Third, well ask, how were people arrested . Fourth, well ask, how much control did people have over their arrest . What could they do . Is there any way they could shape what happened during their arrest at different times . And then finally, how did people feel about being arrested . That fifth one is one that we will sort of fail to answer, right . Well never actually quite get to that but thats actually the question i most want to get at. If you guys know that in this class we largely do discussion, right . Were largely all about getting answers through active discussion, and so i want you to think about this lecture as a really, really long discussion question, okay . What were going to try to do is talk through some of the things that happened, some of the ways being arrested changed or stayed the same over the century with the goal of coming to the end, and working together to think through how people must have experienced arrest during these times. The reason that we have to come through it, through this indirect way, its really hard to get evidence about how people experienced arrest, right . People didnt tend to write it down, right . Where they did write down their experience during arrest people didnt keep it. They werent archiving where the writings of more elite people might be kept . So we dont have very many records of what being arrested was like and even when you start interviewing people as i have been doing recently, we start interviewing people about being arrested, one thing that i really noticed is that they tend to not tell you what it felt like to be arrested even when you keep on asking them and it took me a long time to try to figure out why that was and suddenly, it shouldnt have taken me that long. Being arrested is a traumatic experience or not always, but it can be a traumatic experience. People do not like to remember it and they do not like to talk about it. So its really hard to get at this question of what its like to be arrested. Nevertheless, well make that effort today because i think its very important, both for understanding people who were arrested and what their experiences were, but also, i think that in understanding the arrest, it tells us a lot about the people who are inside the law. What they are avoiding, right . And why they are avoiding it. What they are afraid of. Why they dont step over that line to the outside of the law. I think its a really important question. So, if you were arrested, im trying to remember which way to turn this . Here we go. So first, who was arrested. The answer isnt simply immigrants. There are a whole bunch of different answers to this question. If you were arrested at any time in history, the chances were that you fit pretty specific demographic characteristics. You can predict pretty well in any time in history who is most likely to be arrested. Some of those you guys probably know, some of the demographics through history. What would be some characteristics who would be likely to be arrested, at any time in american history, in the 20th century . Just yell it out. Drunk people. Yeah. Actually, its almost like you already read my lecture and youre up on the next section because well talk all about drunk people. What about demographic characteristics. What kinds of people are most likely to be arrested demographally . Poor. Poor people. Minorities. Minorities. And thats going to change, whether from immigrants like were talking about up here to africanamericans. Being the most overpoliced group and in other areas, mexican americans. Young boys. Yep. Particularly you should put up your hands, im sorry, im not doing a good job with calling. But, yeah, so people who are teenagers, right . We were talking about some of that and also, the most obvious ones men, right . Men. Men are by far, men and boys are by far the most likely population to be arrested doesnt change over time. So just to give you some numbers on that. One of the most consistent features of people who are arrested through the progressive era to the present is that they are going to be male. 90 pretty much, almost at any time, you dont get too far from the 90 mark that the people who are arrested will be male. Female arrests get a little bit higher in time, but basically, you had 10 in 1897, 10 in 1989, these numbers are from pittsburgh but they are pretty representative of the entire country but its a pretty steady number throughout american history. 90 of arrests will be of men and boys. Age is going to jump around a little bit more than that, which, as some people pointed out, you have juveniles. Particularly 16 and 17yearolds, will be very likely to be arrested at pretty much all times in history. Very heavily arrested age group. Arrest rates for juveniles are going to skip around a little bit more than the really consistent gender arrest rates. In 1897, 20 of all arrests were of people 20 or younger. Thats how they kept those numbers instead of cutting them off at 18. A little bit different. In 1956, again, youre going to have Something Like 20 of the people who are arrested are going to be, in this case, under 18. So you have and this fluctuates down to in the 1950s, they actually arrested more like 8 , 8 to 9 , Something Like that, on juveniles, in the 1950s. 1952, they claim only to have arrested 3. 7 juveniles so it does fluctuate as they develop different kinds of Police Policies to deal with juvenile population. Thats a number that will change a little bit more but generally speaking, juveniles, older juveniles, 16 and 17, heavily policed and heavily arrested population. After that, in almost all periods, youre going to have 20yearolds and 20 to 30yearold and 30 to forty yearold will be in some cases 30 to 35yearolds are the majority of people arrested, thats in the 1950s and 1960s, when you breakdown those numbers almost all of them are being arrested for drunkenness. And vagrancy. Were going to clean up the streets and in periods, they are targeting older men. Not that 30 to 35 is very old but relatively older men. Okay. So basically, though, youre going to be a young or youngish male if youre arrested at any time. This isnt going to change that much. One thing that does change is after the war on drugs starts you actually get an increase in the 1980s and 1990s on juvenile arrests, so you get up somewhere to near 25 of arrested juvenile arrests, and thats new. Minority status. If youre a member of a racial minority, you are always often not always, but often, particularly likely to be arrested and thats why we have this slide up here because it seems so, in some ways this article seems so familiar, this is actually an article which is making the case, its from 1912 in pittsburgh, and its actually making the case that immigrants are not criminally inclined. A counterintuitive case at the time that actually immigrants arent particularly likely to commit crime. That they are more likely to be arrested for nuisance violations and things like that. But the reason that they are making that case is that most people assume that immigrants, in this case, in this period, they are talking about eastern and southern european immigrants, are particularly criminally inclined. As you get black migration up from the south during the early 20th century, particularly up through world war i and into the 1920s, the eastern and southern europeans are going to be sort of merged into the general way of whiteness. People stop recognizing them as a Distinct Group and their place will be taken by africanamerican migrants, southern migrants, who are seen as particularly criminal, particularly the ones who have recently come up from the south are seen as having brought some sort of inherent criminalality with them. They will be very likely to be arrested. So, for instance, in 1967, nationally, africanamerican arrests are about five times the rate of white arrests, okay . And thats going all the way back to 1967. Were very familiar with that story of overincarceration but thats also true in terms of arrests. So, for instance, in pittsburgh, in 1989, 54 of arrests were of nonwhite people, which is going to be in pittsburgh. Very largely africanamerican, where as they make up, at that time, something around 1 3 of the population. So its a very extreme form of overrepresentation among the arrested population. Quite disproportionate. Another category that some of you guys brought up is economically marginal. This is something that has a very long history. In 1987, if you look at the Police Records from pittsburgh, they do a very good job writing down all of these characteristics so all the people they have arrested that year, and its interesting to note that on the long list of people they arrested, 58 of the people they arrested gave their occupation as laborer. Okay . As laborer. So 58 give their occupation as laborer. When you add in the other most frequent occupations, which are no occupation, clerks, right . And, this is going to get a little more complicated but the other really common one is housekeeper. Thats because women are going to call themselves housekeepers, so thats basically all women, the 10 of women coming in, not almost all, but a lot of women would be calling themselves housekeepers. But when you add in those categories, youre at Something Like 80 of all people who are arrested are from these very lowest populations, social economic populations in 1897. Again, thats something which really isnt going to change dramatically over time. There is obviously some exceptions, right . There is a list of hundreds of occupations in which people are arrested in pittsburgh, right . But definitely the huge numbers are coming with the laborers, the clerks, no occupation. In 1967, nationally, 24 of everyone who was arrested was a laborer, right . At a time when only 5 of the population was on the census as laborers. So again, that will be the very lowest category of people, who are unskilled workers, using their strengths to make their daytoday living without having a particular training. So thats going to be consistent over time. There is almost no variance in that. Economically marginal. Another important characteristic of people who are going to be arrested is that they are going to be members of a non in many cases, members of a group thats deemed nonconforming or threatening, and that group could be a group with a political orientation. It could be, for instance, there are a lot of periods in time in which communists were very heavily overpoliced and subject to arrest. Communists and hippies. If you want to go back into the 1960s and 1970s, people thatdressed like hippies, out there doing hippie things, were very likely to be arrested with their guitars. But they were very likely to be arrested, you know, at this time, of anarchists. They were often subject to arrest, or black panthers, later on, being arrested in part because they are a member of a Minority Group. But they are going to be arrested at much greater rates than other members of black populations because they are a member of this sort of adversarial group thats deemed threatening or menacing. Gay americans, right . Gay americans, who are often seen particularly through much of the 20th century, were widely seen as sort of a dangerous group of people, sort of a danger to our nation, potentially subversive, right . Were very, very heavily overpoliced, very, very likely to be arrested. So if youre arrested, you usually were a member of some of these kinds of population. The thing is, how this comes back to our question of, how did you experience your arrest . Is that not only were you a member of this population, but you also were well aware that these populations were overpoliced and subject to, you know, subject to