This is good news and I'm guessing Nick Crowson's been on their case about the 1824 Act. If they'd ever asked me or any other historian of vagrancy we'd have said the exact same, the 1824 Act was retrograde and cruel *at the time*. Much worse now.
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Thing is, the 1824 Act was designed to be cruel and to go alongside a big push to "clean the streets" by the mendicity societies of the day. It was a precursor to the casual wards and flophouse era of vagrancy history in the middle and later c19th and was an early expansion of policing power.
It's been a really quite nutty holdover from a previous era of "discretionary policing" of the poor, where the evidentiary standards for being criminalised (for rough sleeping) were low to absent, which the courts pretty much struck down as much as they could by the 1970s.
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