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The pauper hospital
Published in Kah Seng Loh, Li Yang Hsu, Tuberculosis – The Singapore Experience, 1867–2018, 2019
In contrast, the bulk of Singapore’s population who had tuberculosis represented a much larger and very different group and social class: namely, the paupers. Historically, paupers are interesting: in nineteenth-century England, for instance, pauperism came to the state’s notice as a serious problem of work-shy and idle people which was infecting and demoralising the labouring class as a whole. It began to attack the broad charity which hitherto had been given freely to paupers, by distinguishing between those deserving of relief and others who were not. Part of the impulse was punitive: able-bodied paupers were sent to the workhouse under the provisions of the Poor Law as punishment for their idleness, and strenuous efforts were made to screen out ‘clever paupers’ who were trying to obtain unmerited charity.8 As a former vagrant in Britain reflected, the twentieth-century establishment still regarded vagrants and paupers as a group of the ‘socially sick’, whom it found embarrassing and wanted to integrate into capitalist society.9 The imposed solutions to pauperism were thus thrift and regular hard work. On the other hand, deserving paupers would receive humanitarian relief. They included infirm, decrepit or ill persons who were physically unable to work and provide for themselves, who would be sent to hospitals to be cared for.
‘This laudable Institution’: the permanent Society is launched in 1821
Published in Gordon C Cook, Disease in the Merchant Navy, 2019
If more detail(s) were required to stress the enormous value of this new endeavour, the first Annual Report (see also Chapter 9) provided it: Shipwrecks, on various parts of the coasts of England, which unhappily have been so frequent of late, have subjected the constitutions of many Seamen to the severest injury, from long privations and excessive fatigue. In all such cases, when medical assistance can no further avail, a conveyance is provided for them to their homes, with every comfort necessary for the journey.Instances occur daily, of seamen driven into a life of vagrancy by diseases he stressed] originating in distress and privation;– men of this description are nevertheless received by the SHS], if deserving. In these cases it is often found necessary to destroy the raggs which cover them, to prevent infection; and they are then provided with new clothing, and thus enabled to resume their avocations.
The young: a generation full of problems
Published in Micha de Winter, Children as Fellow Citizens, 2018
While the social renewal child is still alive and kicking (witness the numerous educational support and pre-school stimulation projects now being carried out everywhere in the Western World) it has meanwhile got a major competitor. The combating of deprivation as a social priority seems to have been supplanted by the combating of its supposed dangers: delinquency, vandalism, vagrancy, fraud, misuse of social services and so on. In this context a social and political atmosphere ensues in which the decline of public morality is blamed for all kinds of social ills. With regard to young people an image emerges of the blurring of standards and lack of responsibility, blamed partly on themselves, partly on their educators. The problem of rising juvenile delinquency is said to be mainly due to inadequate ‘moral’ education at home and in schools. This proposition, hard to prove in itself, served as a guideline for numerous political speeches and propositions in the early nineties: exhortations to parents to pay more attention to standards and values, lessons in moral reasoning at school, strengthening of the educational task of schools, boot camp for seriously derailed youngsters, etc. In short: young people, via parents, school and the law, should be morally rearmed7. Because at this same time all sorts of provisions for young persons (social benefits, study grants) were cut, some called this an attack on, or even a ‘war against the young’ (Heemskerk, 1993; Helder, 1993).
Social Work & Corrections in the Progressive Era: What We Remember, What We Obscure
Published in Journal of Progressive Human Services, 2023
Abrams (2000), Cree (2016), and Brice (2011) stress the relationship between delinquency and female sexual expression, noting that the majority of girls6While others were sentenced to correctional facilities during this time, social workers, predominantly female, overwhelmingly worked with “same-gendered” adults and children. Note that then and now, institutions rely on and enforce a gender binary; there have always been men and gender non-conforming individuals in institutions designed for “women and children.” adjudicated through early courts were charged with “moral” offenses. Brice (2011) explains that criminalized offenses included vagrancy (homelessness), stubbornness, deceitfulness, laziness, sexual independence, and running away from home.
The Keepers and the Kept: Social Work and Criminalized Women, an Historical Review
Published in Journal of Progressive Human Services, 2022
Further, felony laws began to change. During slavery, African Americans were not readily imprisoned because they were treated as a commodity. Punishment was dealt with primarily by slave owners (Young & Spencer, 2007). After reconstruction, they were imprisoned for minor offenses and the prison population began to swell. Convict leasing, a practice in which states leased prisoners through a contractor for work, was then deployed to provide the South with an involuntary workforce (Hinton & Cook, 2020). When convict leasing went out of fashion, forced labor laws remained intact through the implementation of prison/state run public works projects for prisoners. For example, during WWI and WWII the South implemented “fight or work” programs. These programs applied vagrancy laws to African American women in order to compensate for labor shortages.
Adult antisocial behavior and its relationship to the diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder in a longitudinal study of homelessness
Published in Journal of Social Distress and Homelessness, 2021
Vinay S. Kotamarti, Carol S. North, David E. Pollio
Information was obtained about history of criminal behavior (including lifetime arrests and charges for specific types of crimes) and residential history including housing status for the majority of the last year. Four variables were created to encompass crimes within specific categories: 1) crimes against people (including assault, rape, and homicide), crimes against property (including shoplifting, vandalism, robbery, and burglary), weapons offenses, and disorderly conduct; 2) drug charges; 3) court violations (including parole violation and contempt); and 4) homeless status crimes (“crimes of existence” conceptually similar to status offenses and juvenile offenders (Burton, Pollio, & North, 2018), including vagrancy, sleeping in public places, trespassing, public intoxication, and public urination.