Governmentality on the Road Available to Purchase

In Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville (1972), the US Supreme Court ruled vagrancy laws unconstitutional. These laws were older than the nation itself. Vagrancy laws had arrived with the English colonization of the Americas and granted their enforcers wide leeway to apprehend or expel anyone presumed to pose a potential threat to security, property, or racial regimes of labor and resource distribution. They laid the groundwork for the surveillance of “suspicious persons” in ways that continue to foundationally structure police authority and violence today. Writing for the majority in Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, William O. Douglas ruled that these laws were unconstitutional because their vagueness placed “almost unfettered discretion in the hands of the police” (Papachristou v. City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156 [1972], 156). He then ventured beyond the Constitution itself to assert that the restriction of free mobility impinges on “unwritten amenities” that, while spelled...