The Supreme Court Is on the Verge of Criminalizing Homelessness
Since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, advocates and policy analysts have warned of a homelessness “tsunami.” It’s the worst-case scenario where the combination of lost income, backlogs of owed rent, and a lack of local government foresight contribute to a surge of people losing housing and ending up on the street. Well, it has arrived—and it’s poised to get much worse as the Supreme Court is set to decide whether to make homelessness a de facto crime.This past month, many cities and counties conducted their annual point-in-time homelessness counts. The results of January’s counts won’t be known for several more months, but they’re likely to be dire. The end-of-2023 results found that approximately 653,000 people were experiencing homelessness. That’s up more than 70,000 over 2022, or a 12 percent increase. In the 12 months since that data was collected, those numbers have likely gone up.
But the raw numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. As more people end up experiencing homelessness, they’re also facing increasingly punitive and reactionary responses from local governments and their neighbors. Such policies could become legally codified in short order, with the high court having agreed to hear arguments in Grants Pass v. Johnson.
Originally brought in 2018, the case challenged the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, over an ordinance banning camping. Both a federal judge and, later, a panel from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck the law down, saying that Grants Pass did not have enough available shelter to offer homeless people. As such, the law was deemed to be a violation of the Eighth Amendment.
The ruling backed up the Ninth Circuit’s earlier ruling on the Martin v. City of Boise case, which said that punishing or arresting people for camping in public when there are no available shelter beds to take them to instead constituted a violation of the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause in the Eighth Amendment. That applied to localities in the Ninth Circuit’s area of concern and has led to greater legal scrutiny even as cities and counties push for more punitive and restrictive anti-camping laws. In fact, Grants Pass pushed to get the Supreme Court to hear the case, and several nominally liberal cities and states on the West Coast are backing its argument. If the Supreme Court overturns the previous Grants Pass and Boise rulings, it would open the door for cities, states, and counties to essentially criminalize being unhoused on a massive scale.
Via Violet Blue's Cybersecurity Roundup: April 23, 2024
The Supreme Court Is on the Verge of Criminalizing Homelessness
As the high court deliberates, policymakers are preparing for the possibility that they might solve a problem they created in the most punitive way.The New Republic
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Wilco Roos
in reply to Andrew Pam • • •Richard
in reply to Andrew Pam • • •Karl Auerbach
in reply to Andrew Pam • • •I am rather in favor of overturning the Martin case (that's the one that came up with the 8th amendment "cruel and unusual" argument).
Our city/county is overrun. We have among the highest percentage of homeless in the state of California. That's because we are a nice beach town with a reasonable climate. Inland cities, such as Bakersfield (in other words, bad weather, ugly surroundings) have a much lower homeless percentage.
Our city/county is now spending about $200,000+/year per homeless person! It is the largest part of the county yearly expenses. That flow of money has created what some are calling the "homeless industrial complex" of institutions that feed on that cash flow and thus have an incentive for the problem to continue rather than be resolved. (One such was a group that rather than doing a one-for-one needle exchange was simply handing out new drug needles in large quantities - leading to a need for people to wear boots with thick soles on the beach else get stabbed with a stray needle. The woods behind our house are filled with empty needle packaging.)
... show moreI am rather in favor of overturning the Martin case (that's the one that came up with the 8th amendment "cruel and unusual" argument).
Our city/county is overrun. We have among the highest percentage of homeless in the state of California. That's because we are a nice beach town with a reasonable climate. Inland cities, such as Bakersfield (in other words, bad weather, ugly surroundings) have a much lower homeless percentage.
Our city/county is now spending about $200,000+/year per homeless person! It is the largest part of the county yearly expenses. That flow of money has created what some are calling the "homeless industrial complex" of institutions that feed on that cash flow and thus have an incentive for the problem to continue rather than be resolved. (One such was a group that rather than doing a one-for-one needle exchange was simply handing out new drug needles in large quantities - leading to a need for people to wear boots with thick soles on the beach else get stabbed with a stray needle. The woods behind our house are filled with empty needle packaging.)
Our city/county has several hundred homeless beds and warming centers. But there are people who refuse to use them because of rules against pets or drugs. We have food centers aplenty.
There are homeless people who could use help to resume a normal life, but there are also druggies who have proven resistant to help for decades, not to mention a lot of voluntary vagabonds living the Jack Keaurac (sp) lifestyle (we even have a $millionaire homeless guy who has an apartment - he's quite a case.) (Many of those latter folks consider themselves musicians and try to make some money by busking on the streets - too often doing extremely bad renditions of already over-used Grateful Dead tunes.
Cities effectively have zero sum budgets - there is a real question whether money should be spent on housing a person who has proven immune to past help or whether that money would be better spent on helping a promising young person get food and an education. That kind of triage is painful, even cruel, but we are at a point where we face a choice between investing in our future or pouring resources into those who have been receiving those resources for 10, 20, ... years without improvement.
Jesus could create loaves and fishes out of thin air; we can't.
If the Martin case law stands cities and counties will join together to build joint sleeping facilities - often if places that are beyond walk/bike distance to city cores. Some will call those "concentration camps" (which will be true in a technical sense.)
And cities will seek to expand their geographic limits so that they could build sleep centers in distant parts of the city. (California City, for instance, extends deep into the Mojave desert.)
If SCOTUS endorses the Martin decision then I would anticipate not only concentration sleeping camps, but that they would be located next to jails and prisons (which could save expenses.)
The image of Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio running one of these sleep centers just ran through my mind. Yeech, now I gotta go wash my brain with soap to get rid of that image.
Richard
in reply to Andrew Pam • • •Richard
in reply to Andrew Pam • • •Karl Auerbach
in reply to Andrew Pam • • •That transition from being with parents or being in school is really tough. I know I struggled to get that first real job after college, and I know that it is harder today. Young people today are as smart and creative as any in history, but we are not doing a great job in creating places for them to exercise their talents.
I am in favor of universal basic income (UBI); one of its benefits is that it makes it easier to survive while figuring out what one can do in life.
Richard
in reply to Andrew Pam • • •Andrew Pam
in reply to Andrew Pam • • •A Paradigm Shift in Social Policy: How Finland Conquered Homelessness
Jan Petter (DER SPIEGEL)Karl Auerbach
in reply to Andrew Pam • • •Richard
in reply to Andrew Pam • • •@Andrew Pam Right? There are no surprises here.
@Karl Auerbach I was clean, had clean clothes, used a friend's address, and fortunately had a cell phone left over from when I had a job. And so were most of the other homeless people. Seriously, the person who hired me is an amazing human being.