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.
Name a more iconic trio than capitalism, Christianity, and conservatism.
Centrally organized religions in general. Let’s not let the others off the hook. It seems like the second prayer gets away from it’s community ideals it turns sour.
The desire to fuck children is a fundamental progressive trait
In fact, there has never been a point in human history when progressives were opposed to child rape, even a little bit.
Do you see how stupid you sound?
My statement is based on observable, documented fact. Yours is based on nonsense.
Conservative apologists gotta conserve, I guess.
The hell it is. The Liberal party of Canada, for 5 years all about digital ID for tracking citizens movement, suddenly is against the same concept when it comes to minors and porn. I’m against both, being an actual conservative, but it’s fucking telling about the mindset.
Oh boy… Digital ID is not about tracking citizens movement. If you file your taxes every year or change your mail delivery at the post office they already know where you are roughly. It’s a government services key meant to streamline services and provide insurable encryption protection for government sign ins to try and keep service Canada digital information more secure. Those service Canada sign ins already exist and they already log location data the same way your Gmail account does to flag potential insecurity in the system. The Digital IDis just designed to try and be an anti phishing measure. The thing is also completely voluntary because like any encryption it isn’t perfect.
The reason the Liberals are not happy about the whole individualized digital ID for porn is that they are listening to the techs and have concerns that even if the porn people were watching was kosher the encryption would have to handshake with the sketchiest sites who would be able to mine location data from users by default and potentially cause issues with identity theft issues. If some phishing scammer manages to crack the system you could have a situation where people start cloning the IDs and creating prime blackmail material. Imagine if you will someone telling you that they have your Digital ID and they are gunna go use it on some kiddie porn if you don’t do what they want.
There’s also just logistical concerns because the handshake has to go both ways. To make it work you have to give the code that can be easily backwards engineered to the owners of the websites.
The Digital ID the Conservatives are proposing crack downs would also be would be basically semi mandatory. Honestly it would probably just drive more people to get their wanking material from even less legitimate places that don’t require the ID…funneling more people into the porn black market.
To add to Drivebyhaiku’s excellent post…
You are pointing at a neo-liberal party, not a progressive party. The word “liberal” can include conservatives, such as the neo-liberals (conservatives) who dominate the Liberal Party of Canada. Progressives (non-conservatives) in Canada can be found in the NDP.
The NDP has agreements with the Liberal Party to defend against the the Conservative Party, who are farther right than the Liberal Party. But, make no mistake. Neo-liberals are conservatives by every international standard.
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.
You’re correct, of course. All I’m saying is that the anti-homeless laws don’t directly apply to three strikes laws. What you’re pointing out is a feature of all law enforcement contacts, though, including traffic enforcement. Vehicle codes are sprawling and that’s by design, it gives law enforcement nearly carte blanche to initiate a contact first and come up with a justification afterwards. And, of course, each traffic stop for “your windows look tinted” is a potential pathway to a felony. That is, the felony potential stemming from police contacts isn’t unique to homeless laws, it applies to virtually every petty contact police make.
It’s indirect in the same way that court fees and orders to pay private debts are an indirect way to create debtor’s jails. They left a written step out but it is understood to be there by everyone involved in the system.
Got a problem? Just make it illegal! Bam! Solved!
Next up: Not finding a job is going to become illegal, thus solving unemployment issues!
Just make crime illegal.
But that would make 3/4 of all politicians just disappear. Huh… come to think of it, we should do it!
I think your number is a little low.
They did that already…they tied healthcare to being employed.
Conservatives can’t understand why we did away with debtors prison.
They’ll start to notice when there’s a downturn in their stock earnings due to imprisoning everyone. They have to feel it personally before they take issue with such problems. They don’t have a very far attention span.
Oh no the stock market will do just fine when we create different tiers of
work campprison with different suppliers. There’ll just be less variety in stocks.“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”
- Hank the-one-man-think-tank Thoreau
They’ll have just invested in the newly expanded private prison system then.
Things gonna be a money maker, all that free labor…and if you refuse to work they tack on YEARS extra.
Man that’s gonna make for some spicy prison riots.
I hate to say this but they’re going to find out the hard way that most of the homeless veterans are that way by choice and they remember how to fight in an organized manner. Our very own hometown militarized gangs! Yay!
We all knew that was part of the endgame, c’mon now. This will probably only surprise them, since, y’know, they don’t know anyone who’s ever served before.
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…
Gun control in a nutshell.
I’ll take false equivalency for 500, Alex!
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.
It’s THEIR liberty – not yours. You can go get fucked.
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.
How do you explain the liberal cities and states on the West Coast, then?
Liberals be like
Their market worshipping ideology is barely an improvement over conservatism imo. What we need is progressivism and socialism, but so long as conservatives are turning into fascists I feel compelled to suppprt the liberal douchebags Citizens United has left us with (at least as far as my voting goes, anyway).
Much like doing genocide and supporting the police, there’s a bipartisan consensus on inflicting violence on unhoused people.
“If they wanted their concerns to be taken seriously they should have made a donation to someone’s campaign!”
No war but class war
Liberal does not mean progressive.
The term liberal was used to refer to fiscal policies, until Republicans in the Reagan era began misusing the word as a pejorative for Democrats. Most Democrats (especially leadership) are not progressives. Most elected Democrats are neo-liberals, even in blue cities. Neo-liberals are conservatives.
We do not have a viable progressive party in the U.S. We have a conservative party and a more conservative party.
Liberals are conservatives. That’s how.
Too many neolibs, not enough social Democrats and similar. A number of socialized programs would cut the homeless population. And we probably wouldn’t have an opioid crisis if we had socialized healthcare (because pushing opioids was done for profits after all)
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.
Yep. But you can’t just give people handouts, so it’ll be mandatory and come with a period of enslavement
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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.
- 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.
Hell, camps where they didn’t have to worry about cops coming through and smashing up all of their stuff and telling them to find a different neighborhood would actually be an improvement over where we’re at now
Instead they get prison guards coming through and destroying all their stuff. Yay.
Yeah, fair point, I had to refresh my memory a bit on the details of those sanctuary districts and there definitely did not seem to be any protections against police/guard violence, and the whole “you’re forbidden from leaving until you’re not poor” thing totally ruins anything that might have been theoretically good about them
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.
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.
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.
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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.
