agreed. completely. But for the purposes of this thread and the post itself…muddying the water with additional arguments about the causes of homelessness won’t be productive. At least not in my experience on bbs. It just turns into a mess.
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Which is another way of saying it is illegal to be too poor to pay rent. Of course, this runs counter to this statement of interest published in 2015 by the Department of Justice. Which contains, in part, these wonderful quotes
The “Cruel and Unusual Punishments” Clause of the Eighth Amendment “imposes
substantive limits on what can be made criminal and punished as such.” Ingraham v. Wright, > 430 U.S. 651, 667-68 (1977). Pursuant to that clause, the Supreme Court has held that laws that criminalize an individual’s status, rather than specific conduct, are unconstitutional
In this case, Plaintiffs are homeless individuals who were convicted of violating certain
city ordinances that prohibit camping and sleeping in public outdoor places. They claim that the City of Boise and the Boise Police Department’s (“BPD”) enforcement of these ordinances against homeless individuals violates their constitutional rights because there is inadequate shelter space available in Boise to accommodate the city’s homeless population. Plaintiffs argue that criminalizing public sleeping in a city without adequate shelter space constitutes criminalizing homelessness itself, in violation of the Eighth Amendment.
Finally, pursuing charges against individuals for sleeping in public imposes further
burdens on scarce public defender, judicial, and carceral resources. Thus, criminalizing
homelessness is both unconstitutional and misguided public policy
For the reasons stated above, the Court should adopt the analysis in Jones to evaluate
Boise’s anti-camping and disorderly conduct ordinances as applied to Plaintiffs in this case. If the Court finds that it is impossible for homeless individuals to secure shelter space on some nights because no beds are available, no shelter meets their disability needs, or they have exceeded the maximum stay limitations, then the Court should also find that enforcement of the ordinances under those circumstances criminalizes the status of being homeless and violates the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.
So all we need now is for a homeless person to be arrested and some nice group like the ACLU to defend them and strike down the law.
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Oh, have you visited over at the Molly Ringwald thread… speaking of! 
(Just kidding, don’t go there! It’s a mess!)
I get your point for sure, but it’s going to come up. I do think you’re correct about these laws targeting the homeless, but who we perceive as worthy of help and worthy of criminalization tends to break down along racial lines.
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off topic: I read Ringwald’s piece…and then beginnings of the thread and began to respond to someone and decided NOPE! staying away from this.
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That’s better than the literal spikes I’d see in downtown Cincinnati.
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Your mental health with thank you!
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Technically, you aren’t supposed to be sleeping in the library, but as long as you aren’t snoring, drooling on the table, or actually making house (i.e., sprawled with all your belongings across an aisle or laying on a couch), we don’t tend to enforce it. We would also prefer you to use the restrooms inside the library or next door at the park, rather than peeing on the building.
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This is also highly unfair to persons who suffer from narcolepsy. The condition often goes undiagnosed and can make it difficult to hold a job or drive a car (and thus is a risk factor for homelessness). People with narcolepsy are often dismissed as depressed or just plain lazy.
https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health-topics/narcolepsy
https://med.stanford.edu/narcolepsy/symptoms.html
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I was just in traffic/infraction court. >20% of defendants were homeless or between jobs, and nearly all of them knew they could work off the fine instead of paying $$. The judge was fair and compassionate.
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A lot of them probably don’t bother showing up in court. While they’re on the street, it doesn’t make much difference to them, but when they try to rebuild from that it creates a massive barrier.
Buddy, can you spare $70,000?
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There are indeed. And if you imagine that minorities are not hassled more, even among the homeless, then you imagine a world that does not exist.
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Ive seen more compassion coupled with common sense solutions at our Public Library than at city hall. If you can sleep without snoring (too loudly), drooling (too much), or wetting yourself (at all), our Librarians (ie saints) will probably let you be.
Legislators and public policy makers should consult library staff!
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I am and I was cited a number of years of years back. The prosecutor however declined the case which took a ridiculous amount of time to even come before the court.
It speaks volumes about a society that will spend far more to harm the poor than it will ever even consider spending to help them escape poverty, that so many voters would sooner pay for a person to be beaten, jailed and fined than helped to become a productive member of society. Truly cutting off your nose to spite your face.
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As happened in Denver with several of their anti-camping laws and taking-of-stuff actions. But while the defense of the defenseless takes a long time, throwing the homeless out of visible parts of town takes only a couple days, so the authoritarians win this almost by default.
I think Americans are afraid of anyone (poor) getting anything for “free.” They would rather have a country filled with bad outcomes than think that (poor) people are “freeloading”.
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Nah, we should just keep sending them bootstraps. They clearly just need more bootstraps.
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You mean to tell me homeless camps are not egalitarian gatherings of kind misunderstood equals sharing what they have in a hardscrabble world, occasionally breaking into song, guv’nah?
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OK if I plug in my CPAP? It’s one of the newer types, really small and quiet.
(I joke, but I have an acquaintance in Eastern Canada who needs a CPAP to sleep, and was homeless last I heard.)
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That’s part of it. Part of it is that Americans are bad at math because the education system has inculcated an irrational fear of it. Another part is when people feel afraid and disempowered, they often take the resulting anger out on the easiest targets (AKA bully mentality). And another is that people aren’t by nature very good at taking the long view. And yet another is that people aren’t by nature very good at abstracting compassion to people they don’t personally know.
I don’t think any of these are exclusively American failings, but the unChristian Xtian prosperity gospel nonsense that wealth is virtue had something of a choke-hold on America due in part to the noble but unrealized dream of meritocracy. (As an atheist, I think we’d ultimately be better off without religion, but I’m absolutely certain we’d be better off if more soi-disant Christians followed the teachings of their putative savior.)
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