The Supreme Court Is on the Verge of Criminalizing Homelessness
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.
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.
What’s gonna happen is they’re going to get arrested and sent to a private prison who will then profit off their free slave labor. And in states with three strike rules that’ll happen a couple times back to back and then you have permanent indentured servitude.
The desire to enslave people is a fundamental conservative trait.
In fact, there has never been a point in human history when conservatives were opposed to slavery, even a little bit.
The last state, (I can't remember which red state it was), to pass an anti homeless law caught flack because they included it in stand your ground reasons. However also in that bill was a nice little pathway to felony for the homeless and a three strikes law.
So yeah. That's exactly it.
While I broadly agree with the sentiment of your post, three strikes laws usually only apply to felonies, and criminalized homelessness is typically misdemeanor stuff. Not a defense of three strike laws, they're fucking garbage, but the truth matters.
And while I broadly agree with your point, it is far too easy for law enforcement to tack on additional charges like resisting arrest. And, yes, in most states resisting arrest is also a misdemeanor, but incidents can be raised to felony resisting arrest if they involve assault on an officer. Unfortunately, it is easy for any innocent physical contact with police to be interpreted as assault, if an officer decides to portray it that way. The truth matters, but so does ACAB
How many times do you let yourself be arrested non violently, knowing all of your stuff and money is going to be gone before you get back?
And by non violently we mean doing exactly what the cops say, when they say, no questions asked, mid conversation after they've declared they're arresting you. And hoping they don't beat you up and charge you anyways for annoying them or imagined disrespect.
Putting anyone in adverse contact with police routinely is creating a pathway to being a felon.
Got a problem? Just make it illegal! Bam! Solved!
Next up: Not finding a job is going to become illegal, thus solving unemployment issues!
They did that already...they tied healthcare to being employed.
If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.
—Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government
Prohibition anyone?
Right wing terrorism!... Wait...
So the Supreme Court is willing to force states to provide shelter and food to homeless people?
I didn't know the Supreme Court justices were socialists.
Oh, no no no, that would be protecting human rights, which conservatives really aren't about. They want to protect states' rights and local governments' rights to harass and brutalize humans. That's their idea of liberty.
No see the idea is to force states to place homeless people in for profit prisons. Pure capitalism!
Landlords evicting people would also be liable since they directly caused a crime to be committed.
That is if you can call the "generosity" of slave owners, socialism.
Yep. But you can't just give people handouts, so it'll be mandatory and come with a period of enslavement
This is my future. I was hit by a driver while riding a bicycle to work 2/26/14. I worked for a chain of bike shops as the Buyer. I left my supercharged Camaro at home and rarely drove. I was 29, no DUI, no reason to have to ride, I chose to ride and race and live. I only barely survived. In 3 days it is the 10 year anniversary of spending most of my days laying in bed. When my folks die, I'll be homeless as it stands now; just another one of more than 100k in the greater Los Angeles basin. If you think disability or social security are some kind of safety net, you are delusional. Most of those people out there are like me, like you, after one bad day at the hands of someone else doing something stupid and completely out of your control.
I'm assuming you've already taken all the legal steps available in your area.
MOVE!
They're alive, so you have support, you have a roof, use the time now to find places that can help you. Make calls, write emails.
Social nets, the few that exist, are still running their programs with the bootstrap mentality. But social programs can and will help you. There are 100% free often national services that have people who's job it is to find programs, file applications, get you to appointments etc.
This is going to be the new war on drugs. The private prisons were being emptied, so they needed a new supply of bodies.
If owning a home is a requirement for just being able to exist in society, then doesn't that mean that homeownership (or at least access to renting a home/apartment/etc) is a human right? Shouldn't prices then be regulated such that salaries/minimum wage actually guaranteed you had access to home ownership/rental? If they're setting home-ownership/rental as a responsibility to be able to live, then they need to guarantee home-ownership/rental is affordable for the majority of Americans.
Those are some cool ideas but TBH I don't think access to housing is what makes most homeless people in the USA homeless to begin with. There are tons of public housing and low cost options.
Usually it's a disability, dementia, or drug dependency issue. Before Reagan we had large scale mental institutions that worked with these sorts of people.
- Make people homeless
- Criminalize homelessness
- Profit
2.1) felony record then banning you from voting
A government sponsored slavery plan
- buy up all residential real estate
- only rent for above market value
- pass laws making homelessness illegal
- profit
Next thing all the homeless people will be put in camps. That's pretty much the plot of that one DS9 episode. Let's just hope Sisko got the memo and makes an appearance.
Just think of the prison industrial complex profits this is going to bring!
Soooo?
Yeah, if that home is in prison, where you are conveniently exempt from the "no slavery" amendment.
Going to need to build a whole lot more of those private, for-profit prisons in order to support this.
"Christians".
Here's their bible's directly instructing the most-devout of Christians to be homeless:
https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+6%3A7-13&version=AMPC
They'd better be ready to butcher any 2nd-coming of their Christ, in order to prevent him ( should he exist ) from pouring hell onto their fake-values religion that gaslights about being Christian.
What despicable evil.
And if any community will not receive and accept and welcome you, and they refuse to listen to you, when you depart, shake off the dust that is on your feet, for a testimony against them. [b]Truly I tell you, it will be more tolerable for Sodom and Gomorrah in the judgment day than for that town.
I'm no bible expert but it sounds to me like those unaccepting of these "homeless" disciples would have hellfire rain down upon them worse than literal sexual deviants.
Ancient Levant, including ancient Israel, was obsessed with being hospitable hosts to visitors. This was an important cultural marker left over from when proto-Israelite culture was bedouin and on the fringes of society in the Levant.
This practice had become slightly more hostile during Roman occupation, but Jesus's teachings on the matter were profoundly conservative--instructing his followers to never waiver from their ancient obligations.
I've got this idea. Maybe all the homeless people should be rounded up and sent to an island somewhere.
We will call that place...Ustralia.
I would not be surprised in the slightest if mentally ill homeless people started getting disappeared by ICE. (Or Texas apparently)
Arm your homeless neighbors.
There are good arguments for both sides here. IMO the solution would require recognizing that homelessness is not a local problem and allocating funds at the federal level for assisting the homeless. I don't see any other way of avoiding the unfair situation created when homeless people quite reasonably choose to travel to cities that provide more assistance to them.
A conservative is not capable of charity. For a conservative to agree to give something to someone, there must be something in it for them.
For example, if a conservative's church does something nice for someone, they believe their "good deed" will be rewarded with eternal bliss. And the church gets the PR it needs to increase its profitable collections. They all get to call themselves "charitable" while not actually engaging in any charitable behavior.
To a conservative, there is no charity. There is only a transaction.
I don’t see any other way of avoiding the unfair situation created when homeless people quite reasonably choose to travel to cities that provide more assistance to them.
The statistics say this isn't the case. Here, in California, they did the most comprehensive study of homelessness ever conducted and concluded that high housing prices were to blame for the overwhelming majority of homelessness...not homeless people from Idaho moving here. Which, in hindsight, seems obvious because how many homeless are even in Idaho? And how many homeless people would even have the money to move in order to improve their homeless life a tiny bit?
EDIT: Here's the study for reference: https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2023/06/425646/california-statewide-study-investigates-causes-and-impacts-homelessness
HUD could buy up vacant rental properties and act as a renter of last resort. This would also set a floor to the rental market to stop it's gallop into speculative pricing.
That's just silly though, most legislators in this country are real estate agents or married to one. They'd never stand for people getting in the way of their grift.
If I had any faith in the prison systems of the USA to not abuse people, not make them do menial labor, and not siphon taxpayer dollars then this might actually be a cool solution: feed em, house em, give them medical treatment.
In America there's a huge problem with addiction and mental illness. These people make up a large portion of the problematic unhoused individuals.
If we could find a way to address these individuals then most of the societally problematic issues with homelessness go away and we can start focusing on helping those remaining who are unhoused due to circumstance, poverty, etc and have a meaningful ability to reintegrate.
I fully support involuntarily committing addicts and the mentally ill once we have a place to put them. If it's bad enough that they're unhoused and being a nuisance to their communities then they are obviously not in a position to be trusted to make the best decisions for themselves and others.
If only there was a way that didn't involve involuntarily committing people, whether to jail or a psych hospital...
You left out that mental illness and addiction are both increasingly acknowledged to very often result from the difficulties of coping with garbage social conditions -- even at an individual level. What came first, the chicken or the egg?
Some wild experiments have been done out there -- mostly in other countries, obv -- where it turns out that when you give these deranged people housing, access to education and/or employment, and maybe even healthy social connections, they get a lot less deranged like super fucking quickly. Just wild.
You're just huffing propaganda.
HF does not make mental illness go away and it does not make substance use go away. When controlled, HF does not lead to a decrease in substance use.
Addicts are getting money for drugs by abusing their communities. People who do crime as a living should not be left on the streets. Mentally ill people unable to meaningfully take care of themselves are no more capable in a building as opposed to outside a building.
Ignoring reality does nothing to further the cause it just elicits push back from everyone who sees the cause associated with delusional clowns.
involuntarily committing
So...jailing. I'm all for providing resources, but you're essentially suggesting forcing them into horrible asylums like we used to do.
Additionally, does addiction and mental illness lead to homelessness, or is it perhaps those that become homeless are more apt to develop addiction and mental health issues? So maybe we look more into what causes people to become homeless in the first place, e.g. lack of a social safety net.
Good. I'm sick of seeing it in my neighborhood. There's a homeless dude by my child's school that was caught pissing on a tree... his schlong was literally hanging out around kids...it's fucking disgusting. Not to mention the "camps" that smell like urine and shit that are popping up near my work.. it's getting ridiculous. But, according to Democrats and Liberals "it's not THEIR fault!" Bullshit... most of these guys are on drugs and booze... they don't want help, they want to keep using shit and doing what they want.