street roots
Feb. 17, 2012
Criminalizing the homeless costs us all
BY PAUL BODEN
became subject to arrest.
C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R
Using the word “we”
he Western Regional Advocacy Project
(WRAP) and the USA-Canada Alliance
of Inhabitants (USACAI) are calling on
our members and allies throughout the
United States and Canada to join us on
April 1 for a bi-national day of action against
the ongoing criminalization of poor and
homeless people in our communities.
We are building a movement to reclaim
our communities for all members, not just
those who set the rents. In order to build
this movement and assert our human rights,
we must make clear the myriad ways in
which our community members are treated
as though they are less than human. We
must connect the dots.
Over the past 30 years, neo-liberal policy
makers have substituted private gain for
public good; they have abandoned economic
and social policies that supported housing,
education, healthcare,
labor, and immigration
Paul Boden is the
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of people experiencing this is an investigation
poverty and
of the policies and
homelessness.
tools by which more
and more people have
been made to suffer.
T
Core to our success in this survey
research was the active, engaged outreach of
volunteers from nearly a dozen different
organizations throughout the United States.
Using an organizing method that WRAP
members have developed and polished on
the streets of West Coast cities, they were
able to procure good information, and, far
more importantly, begin important
conversations within our communities about
the real nature of criminalization and its
impacts. By seeking out homeless people in
the places where they really spend time and
engaging our communities on their own
terms, we were able to develop true,
communal knowledge, founded in collective
experience, and we are able to use the term
“we” to talk about our communities in ways
that isolated “experts” never can. We are
organizing in a more honestly democratic
way.
What We Need
Connecting the dots
Three decades ago, the deregulation of
financial industries came simultaneously
with the withdrawal of government support
for affordable housing. Just since 1995, the
United States has lost more than 290,588
existing units of public housing and 360,000
Section 8 units, with another 7,107 approved
for demolition/disposition since March of
2011. Some 2.5 million foreclosures have
taken place since 2007, an additional 6.9
million foreclosures have been initiated, and
a projected 5.7 million borrowers are at risk.
In those same 15 years, more than
830,000 new jail and prison cells have been
built, draconian immigration laws and
eligibility screening criteria have been
implemented in housing, healthcare,
education and jobs programs, and America’s
three largest residential mental health
facilities are now all county jails (Los
Angeles, Chicago, and New York).
A new wave of criminalization
1982 marked the beginning of
homelessness as a “crime wave” that would
consume the efforts of U.S. police forces
over the next three decades. Crime statistics
show that across the country, millions were
sitting, lying down, hanging out, and -
perhaps worst of all — sleeping. To take one
city as an example, by the end of 2011, these
new crimes comprised roughly one-third of
all prosecuted offenses in San Francisco.
We all suffer from governments that waste
resources and refuse to develop real
solutions to social problems, but the people
whose survival is criminalized suffer the
most.
Over the past year, WRAP has led a survey
effort with its West Coast grassroots
members and allies in Portland, Berkeley,
San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle, Denver,
Houston and Worcester, Mass, documenting
homeless people’s experiences with the
criminal justice system for survival-related
“crimes.” The USA-Canada Alliance of
Inhabitants has helped WRAP take this
effort nationally by reaching out to their
members and surveying homeless people in
cities throughout the U.S. on these issues.
Survey forms in English and Spanish are
available if your organization wants to help
build on this initial effort. WRAP is now
releasing preliminary results from
discussions with more than 668 people
More than three-quarters of survey
respondents (78 percent) reported being
harassed, cited or arrested by police officers
for sleeping outside. Seventy-five percent
reported the same for sitting or lying down,
and 76 percent for loitering or simply
“hanging out.” These were by far the top
crimes for which homeless people were
charged. A sad corresponding fact is that
only one quarter of respondents (25 percent)
believed that they knew of safe, legal places
to sleep. In California, the public lodging law
makes sleeping outside always illegal for
homeless people. The law, by its nature,
makes a large class of poor people
inescapably criminal.
It can feel easy to scoff at these crimes:
most of the relevant laws are summary
offenses (“infractions” in California;
“violations” in some other states), which
means that they can’t directly result in any
jail or prison time. However, 57 percent of
respondents reported bench warrants issued
for their arrest as a result of these citations.
That is, if they couldn’t afford to pay the
fines that these tickets carried, or if they
were unable to make court dates, then they
This is not about caring for or even
advocating for “those people.” This is about
all of us. As Aboriginal leader Lilia Watson
said, “If you have come here to help me, you
are wasting your time. But if you have come
because your liberation is bound up with
mine, then let us work together.”
The rise of repression in the United
States and Canada is a war against all of us.
We need all of us to act in this struggle for
dignity, fairness, and human rights. The
people who pay for and profit from the
criminalization of homeless people are the
same people who benefit from our nation’s
refusal to meet basic human needs. They are
using these laws to do what invading armies
do: they attack us at our most vulnerable
flanks — the communities of poor and
homeless people who have been subjected to
shame and blame for decades.
The sit/lie law that Seattle passed in 1993
is nearly verbatim the same sit/lie law that
San Francisco passed in 2010. The sit/lie law
that San Francisco passed to use against
homeless people is the same sit/lie law that
the San Francisco Police Department now
uses to harass Occupy protesters.
If you are not homeless, if you are not the
target now, then understand that you are
next. Isolated and fragmented, we lose this
fight. But we are no longer isolated.
We can only win this struggle if we use
our collective strengths - organizing,
outreach, research, public education,
artwork, and direct actions. We are
continuing to expand our network of
organizations and cities and we will
ultimately bring down the whole oppressive
system of policing poverty and treating poor
people as “broken windows” to be discarded
and replaced.
community members. This is an important
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homeless people are being targeted
with:
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Have you ever seen or encountered
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Compiled by the Western Regional
Advocacy Project