HIST 553 - Crime, Poverty & Repression

Credits: 4

This course analyzes the interaction between the following concepts: crime, justice, punishment, poverty, community, poor relief, revolt and repression. Poverty and crime have always been associated, but why? As the novelist Anatole France astutely quipped, the law in its majestic equality prohibits rich and poor alike from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges. Similarly, since crimes are by definition threats to the established order, revolts are merely extreme examples of crime and provoke proportionately greater repression. Perceived disorder, whether in the form of tax rebels, petty thieves, vagrant paupers or marginal women, tested the relationship between the the state’s justice and local communities. Examining these links in the different societies of western Europe between 1500 and 1800 should enable us to think more analytically about the increase in heavy-handed policing, the enormous and still expanding prison population, the growing number of executions and the spreading hostility to the poor in American society.