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Home > Journals > Michigan Law Review > MLR > Volume 22 > Issue 6 (1924)

 

Abstract

The word arrest comes from the Latin through the French, and literally means to stop, stay or restrain. In law it relates to restraints upon a person's liberty of locomotion, movement from place to place. To require one to keep her mouth shut is not an arrest, even if wrongful. Every detention or "confinement of the person is an imprisonment, whether it be in a common prison, or private house, or in the stocks," or in the open street or elsewhere. Where codes define false imprisonment "as the unlawful violation of the personal liberty of another," the gist of the offense is the unlawful detention. And detention means more than mere obstruction to movement in a particular direction, however wrongful that may be. "Imprisonment is a total restraint of liberty of the person, for however short a time, and not a partial obstruction of his will, whatever inconvenience it may bring on him"; if one "compels another to stay in any given place against his will",-as to stay and hear a letter read, or compels him "to go in a given direction against his will", he imprisons him "just as much as if he locked him up in a room". It is frequently said "Every restraint of the liberty of a free man will be an imprisonment." But this is "to confound partial obstruction and disturbance with total obstruction and detention. A prison may have its boundary large or narrow, visible and tangible, or, though real, still in the conception only; it may itself be movable or fixed; but a boundary it must have, and that boundary the party imprisoned must be prevented from passing; he must be prevented from leaving that place, within the ambit of which the party imprisoning would confine him except by prison breach. Some confusion seems to arise from confounding imprisonment of the body with mere loss of freedom: it is one part of the definition of freedom to be able to go whithersoever one pleases; but imprisonment is something more than mere loss of this power: it includes the notion of restraint within some limits defined by a will or power exterior to our own." To knock one down and so injure him that he could not move from the place in which he fell would not be an imprisonment, however wrongful it was.

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