{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.021602787456445994, 'fraction_numerical': 0.011149825783972125, 'mean_word_length': 5.93719806763285, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Redefining Vagrancy: Policing Freedom and Disorder in Reconstruction New Orleans, 1862–1868

On several boiling days in July 1865, police swarmed the New Orleans wharves atop the Mississippi River levee. Eyeing the interracial crowd of longshoremen, police arrested all black dockworkers as homeless and unemployed vagrants. The Louisiana criminal code of 1855 defined vagrants as “all idle persons”who live “wandering abroad” without “visible means to maintain themselves”—in short, itinerant and parasitic outsiders. The July levee raids were hardly exceptional, but rather they were one moment within a lengthier pattern of extensive and deeply intrusive postemancipation vagrancy policing that sharply divided the occupied city and raised fierce local and national debates after the CivilWar regarding blackness, criminality, labor, capitalism, and the limits and practice of freedom. Historians invoke such vagrancy arrests as hallmarks of a postbellum criminal justice system that lacked ideological complexity and pursued only the harassment and redeployment of black labor. But vagrancy, while profoundly racialized, was more nuanced and layered than such an explanation allows. New Orleans’s vagrancy policing encoded a deep apprehension regarding wage labor, human migration, and the disruption of normative power relationships between persons. In the face of dramatic social and demographic transformation, vagrancy policing