In nineteenth-century North America public policy responded to the development of an industrial society through the creation of specialized institutions to replace the informal modes of treatment and relatively undifferentiated structures which had characterized earlier approaches to mental illness, crime, juvenile delinquency, poverty, and ignorance. This project, set in nineteenth-century New York, will utilize records of paupers, tramps, the sick, the mentally ill, and criminals to reconstruct the demography of inmate populations, which will be analysed in terms of both the general development of social and family structure and prevailing conceptions of poverty and deviance. Special attention will be paid to the interaction of ideology and actual social patterns in the formulation of public policy. Overall, the project will attempt to trace the interconnections between social structure, public policy, and the casualties of early industrial society.