page_title: Barefoot
section_title: Imprisonment and slavery
hierarchical_section_title: Barefoot / Imprisonment and slavery
caption_attribution_description: English: Picture of a print from David Roberts' Egypt &amp; Nubia, issued between 1845 and 1849.
context_page_description: Barefoot is the most common term for the state of not wearing any footwear.
  Wearing footwear is an exclusively human characteristic, however some animals held by humans are also issued with footwear, such as horses and, more rarely, dogs and cats. There are health benefits and some risks associated with going barefoot. Footwear provides protection from cuts, abrasions, bruises, and impacts from objects on the ground or the ground texture itself, as well as from frost or heat burns, and parasites like hookworm in extreme situations. However, shoes can limit the flexibility, strength, and mobility of the foot and can lead to higher incidences of flexible flat foot, bunions, hammer toe, and Morton's neuroma. Walking and running barefoot results in a more natural gait, allowing for a more rocking motion of the foot, eliminating the hard heel strike and therefore generating less collision force in the foot and lower leg.
  There are many sports that are performed barefoot, most notably gymnastics and martial arts, but also beach volleyball, barefoot running, barefoot hiking, and water skiing.
context_section_description: Removing the footwear from a captive person and forcibly making him or her go barefoot has been one of the first means to identify prisoners and other unfree individuals such as slaves in most civilizations. Due to the fact that protective, as well as ornamental footwear, has consistently been a standard clothing feature since the era of ancient civilizations, the much more uncommon semblance of bare feet tends to stand out in apparent contrast to the usual public appearance. Hereby a certain degree of attention and curiosity is typically generated in an observer, which is often purposefully used to mark certain individuals as unfree.
  The outward form of bare feet, especially of fully denuded toes, is readily distinguishable from that of regular footwear, which is the case from many different angles around the unshod person. Therefore imposing a barefoot rule and enforcing this specific form of appearance has been a principal feature of early and many modern prison uniforms as well as similar manifestations of typifying clothing for otherwise unfree or captive individuals. For example, female prisoners in 1940s Nazi-era Germany had to live under a strictly enforced barefoot rule in a number of different women's institutions. Bare feet were a compulsory element of their prison uniform and covering them in any way was a punishable offense for the imprisoned women. This viable method to mark and identify prisoners is still employed by authorities in many countries of today.
  Seizing the footwear and making an individual go barefoot by constraint is also commonly used in situations where captives cannot be outfitted with identifiable prisoner's clothing due to the circumstances. In those cases forcibly keeping the respective individuals in their bare feet is used as an option, if they are required to be flagged and singled out in an easily obtainable and sufficiently unambiguous manner.
  The practice of keeping prisoners fully barefoot is also applicable to hinder and frustrate potential attempts of escape from any form of captivity. This is the case as the susceptible feet, especially the vulnerable soles and toes, are constantly exposed to potentially adverse conditions of the respective environment. It often proves drastically more difficult for prisoners to advance on any given escape route without having the sufficient protection of their feet. If detainees or captives attempt to flee in only their bare feet, this often does not allow for enough rapid and constant locomotion to evade potential pursuers. Through the usually self-evident awareness of this factor, escape attempts by involuntarily barefooted prisoners are often prevented altogether.
  Going with bare feet naturally renders a person physically vulnerable and also drastically more susceptible to pain and any other form of discomfort caused by his or her immediate environment. For a shoeless individual the individual radius of action and his or her personal freedom is therefore restricted in many everyday situations, that are usually unproblematic for any shod person. As a consequence a forcibly barefooted individual, who is deprived of the possibility to put on shoes at will, is deliberately placed at a physical and through intimidation also psychological disadvantage against a shod person in many regards. The more protection fully clothed men and women receive from their footwear, the more decisive the immediate disadvantage of the barefooted person normally turns out to be. This aspect is often intentionally utilized by police and corrections, where their personnel is typically issued with highly functional protective gear. Removing the footwear off a person and hereby forcing him or her to remain barefoot is therefore routinely used by law enforcement authorities. This is the case as it offers an immediate and easily accessible option to contain and control an individual in any situation of detainment. In most cases the exercise of control can be achieved without the use of physical force as a detainee kept barefoot is hereby already put in a state of intimida
caption: Barefooted slaves depicted in David Roberts' Egypt and Nubia, issued between 1845 and 1849
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "GIMP 2.4.5", "Image DateTime": "2009:03:25 13:33:21", "Image Artist": "Library of Congress", "Image ExifOffset": "138", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "222", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6247", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "1146", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "860"}