No Solutions: Laws to Make Everything About Homelessness Illegal Have Increased Dramatically

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/no-solutions-laws-make-everything-about-homelessness-illegal-have-increased


She spends her days collecting recyclables. She said police give her coffee and donuts sometimes. She was crossing a very busy intersection off the 101 freeway in the Mission. She has lost her possessions many times for lack of a place to store them. Being homeless is sisyphean these days.

While homelessness is worse than ever in many places across the country, more and more cities are addressing the crisis by making it illegal to sleep, sit or simply be in public.

This decades-old trend is spreading even as the social safety net keeps shrinking and housing is at its most expensive. People with nowhere else to go are cited, arrested and jailed for begging, lying on park benches or curling up on stoops—even though criminalizing activities that homeless people do to survive does nothing to end homelessness and costs more than it would to house them.

So finds a study of 187 cities by the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty (NLCHP), an advocacy group that has tracked the way cities address homelessness since 1991. The new report, the first in three years, found a 43 percent increase since 2011 in laws designed to curb the presence of homeless people on the streets (so-called sit-lie laws) and a 60 percent increase in city-wide bans as opposed to more narrow bans focused on downtowns or public parks.

Moreover, in three years, laws that ban sleeping in cars and other private vehicles, the last refuge for many families that have lost their homes, have jumped by 116 percent.

[Downwinder]

1. Like the drug war, when it becomes too expensive to maintain

jails for the homeless it will change.

[blkmusclmachine]

2. Disgraceful actions from those entrusted to Serve, Protect, etc., toward the mentally ill.

[JDPriestly]

3. K&R.

Think what we could do for our social programs if we cut our NSA spying budgets by say 80% and limited the spying to suspected terrorists and eliminated the rest of the electronic surveillance.

[Downwinder]

5. You can put someone up at a hotel for what it costs to incarcerate them.

[TBF]

12. Not to mention all the empty homes from foreclosures -

it makes no sense to me that folks are homeless when there are so many empty ones sitting around.

[mntleo2]

4. K&R!!!!

[newfie11]

6. This started with Reagan

And has escalated.
Out of sight out of mind mentality prevails
When it comes to helping these folks.

This could happen to any of us given the right scenario.

[Fairgo]

7. The heart of democracy is seeing ourselves in

the widow, the stranger, and the orphan...and then responding accordingly. In a small way, this does happen to us, every time we step over the man sleeping in the doorway or turn a blind eye to the family stranded at the truck stop. Every law that makes it illegal to upset the sensibilities of the comfortable with the suffering of the less fortunate is an affront to our democracy. Every ignorance that makes us feel that we are safe from such a fate, that we are somehow made of better stock, is an stain on our soul. We can't escape their reflection in our mirrors. The call to respond cannot be legislated away.

[newfie11]

10. So true! Nt

[quaker bill]

8. One of the guys I work with

has a rap sheet that runs several screens full. Almost all of it is "camping without a permit". He gets arrested for sleeping in a park, spends 20+ days in jail waiting for a trial, gets found guilty and sentenced to time served and released, over and over again. I have been helping him out for 3 or 4 years now and I know that when he is not around, he is back in jail.

This is not a solution. They could put him in an affordable apartment for far less tax $. Better than that would be a sheltered facility where they would at least check once in a while to see if he is getting his meds.

[TheKentuckian]

9. Greatest nation on Earth stuff here!

[ananda]

11. My recent thought processes have been seeing the homeless..

.. as the truly sane and decent people destroyed by an increasingly
dehumanized, materialistic society.

Thus my thinking tells me that society will need to undergo some
serious healing and radical change in order to end the corruption
and blight that leads to anyone being homeless.

[TBF]

13. It's a complicated problem -

folks lose jobs & get tossed out of their homes (which I don't think should be an option but anyway ...) along with the problem of the mentally ill in this country. Like most things handled badly this can be traced back to republicans -

One month prior to the election, President Carter had signed the Mental Health Systems Act, which had proposed to continue the federal community mental health centers program, although with some additional state involvement. Consistent with the report of the Carter Commission, the act also included a provision for federal grants “for projects for the prevention of mental illness and the promotion of positive mental health,” an indication of how little learning had taken place among the Carter Commission members and professionals at NIMH. With President Reagan and the Republicans taking over, the Mental Health Systems Act was discarded before the ink had dried and the CMHC funds were simply block granted to the states. The CMHC program had not only died but been buried as well. An autopsy could have listed the cause of death as naiveté complicated by grandiosity.

More here -- http://www.salon.com/2013/09/29/ronald_reagans_shameful_legacy_violence_the_homeless_mental_illness/ (article about Ronald Reagan)