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Homeless Men and Crime

Homeless men are a diverse group. They include those whose economic resources or behaviors make it difficult to obtain housing, as well as those who choose to be homeless. Depending on the historical period, Americans have labeled these men as vagrants, hoboes, tramps, bums, migrants, skidrowers, urban nomads, and the displaced. At times, scholars, the general public, and the homeless themselves have emphasized differences between these men, debating the characteristics that distinguish, for example, a hobo from a migrant; at other times people have simply grouped these people together and called them the homeless.

Vagrants

One of the earliest conceptualizations of the homeless was that of the vagrant. Vagrants were typically defined as people who had no visible means of support and who traveled from area to area. They were a concern in England as early as 370 CE, but laws against vagrancy reached a pinnacle in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries. In this period, the harsh penalties for vagrancy included whipping, branding, years of servitude, and death. Vagrancy laws and the punishments they inflicted reflected the respective interests of the crown, landowners, the church, towns and cities, and industry in restricting the movement of people. Although these groups described vagrants as being responsible for an array of crimes—from theft to highway robbery, assault, and murder—a lack of historical data makes it difficult to assess the veracity of these claims.

Vagrancy was also prohibited in the thirteen colonies, and this prohibition became state law in most of the country; in some states, these laws survived well into the twentieth century. For example, as late as the 1930s, Mississippi police were paid $2.50 for each vagrant arrested. Vagrants were then fined $75, and many were forced to work out their fine at 20 cents a day. Consistent with earlier perceptions, U.S. legislators typically claimed that vagrants were responsible for crimes other than vagrancy, although they also lacked systematic data to substantiate this charge.

Hoboes, Tramps, and Bums

The Civil War displaced an unprecedented number of Americans; waves of immigration and economic collapse in the 1860s through the 1900s added to these numbers. As a result, breadlines, soup kitchens, shelters, and other emergency services were commonplace throughout the northern United States after 1865. For example, Brooklyn and Boston each provided relief to almost fifty thousand people in the mid-1870s. Although most of these people were local residents, unemployment and poverty forced an increasing number of people to leave their homes in search of a better life. These people often slept in the woods near cities and towns or established more permanent encampments called jungles. In 1873, there were an estimated thirty-eight thousand homeless people in the United States; by 1890 the number had increased to forty-five thousand. The popular press, government, and concerned public offered opposing views of these people: At times the homeless were described as victims of larger economic forces in need of support; alternatively, they were labeled tramps and portrayed as criminals who threatened the well-being of towns and cities and their inhabitants. By 1900, more than twenty states passed tramp laws that restricted these people's movements and encampments.

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