This week on the Lectures and History podcast, the experience of being arrested.

Kent State University professor Elaine France examines which groups throughout history were most

likely to be arrested. She also talks about how the process changed over time with the

introduction of police sidearms

and patrol vehicles. Part of arresting you is getting you, getting you in those cuffs, right?

But part of arresting you is getting you back to the station, right, where you could be put in a jail

cell. Okay, this is, this is something which actually did change substantially over time and

changed what it meant to be policed, right?

This class took place at the Trumbull Correctional Institution in Ohio.

It was part of the National Inside Out Prison Exchange Program, which brings together college students and inmates for classes.

So today we're going to be talking about the question of what it was like to be arrested.

The subject is the arrest in the United States 1880s to 2001.

Now the reason I chose that periodization is that we've been in class talking about the 19th century up through the 1880s,

with our T.J. Stiles book and with our Timothy Guilfoyle book.

And I didn't want to go any past 2001 because I think that there's so many people who have so much sort of living experience

about being arrested in these last 20 years that it seems silly for a historian to begin

to tackle it at this point.

So I'm actually going to be constraining my remarks to that period of time.

And we're going to be asking the question of

what is it like to be arrested during these times in history. Unrest is a simple thing, right? It

seems like a simple thing. There's really a few necessary elements to making something an arrest.

The person making the arrest has to be a representative of the state.

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