The Oregon case decided Friday is the most significant to come before the high court in decades on the issue and comes as a rising number of people in the U.S. are without a permanent place to live.
In true American fashion dating all the way back to its founding, you only matter if you own property.
Seems that way. Empowering local governments to determine legality will inevitably allow NIMBY to criminalize homelessness across the nation, with each city pointing fingers as the next.
Class warfare scorecard.
Having more homes than you need even ones you never sleep in, legal.
Having zero homes and having to sleep on the streets, illegal.
What was their reason for this decision? Did they even give one. It’s time we remove the Supreme Court from office and put them in the street.
They post all their reasonings for every opinion on supremecourt.gov
In this case the tldr is the 8th amendment is concerned with the method or kind of punishment. And here it’s a limited fine for 1st time offenders, a court order prohibiting camping in parks, then to a max of 30 days in jail for people who violate that order.
Here’s the link to the full text: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-175_19m2.pdf
That sounds reasonable until you remember that debtors prison is back, most states make people pay for their incarceration, and semi regular arrests are going to make sure you can’t keep a job to pay that “obligation”.
This is a backdoor into giving more people to the prison industry.
They aren’t trying to find what’s reasonable, they’re trying to find what the law says. There are a lot of stupid things that aren’t unconstitutional, like the death penalty. The majority operates on a ‘garbage in garbage out’ basis. We got a garbage outcome because they have a garbage law, and we haven’t gotten an amendment against it yet.
That said I wholly agree with the sentiment and message regarding the penal institutions we have. The attempts the find different ways to fund that correctional system are consistently producing negative outcomes. The state should bear it’s full weight so that they have incentive to maintain a low prison pop.
SCOTUS has absolutely set realist standards in the past. For example, gun regulations that are de facto bans are treated as such and declared unconstitutional.
They absolutely do not have to sit back and consign homeless people to the prison debt system while bemoaning their inability to enforce the 8th amendment.
The issue is the 8A is understood to have refered to the punishments being cruel or unusual, per the Court, not the offense. The actual punishments here (fine, court order, or 30 days in jail) are fairly normal for laws, the only odd thing about the statute is what the “crime” is.
The court chose that narrow view. They chose to naively interpret the punishment as ending and not transitioning into new forms that can dog people the rest of their lives. It is not something they were required to do. As the dissent points out.
What was their reason for this decision?
Officially? Something mundane, I’m sure. Unofficially and actually? The “labor shortage” we have (which is actually people being reasonably unwilling to work abusive body-destroying soul-crushing senselessly-cruel jobs for less than poverty-level wages) is causing economic damage that’s visible in their portfolios, and a new massive infusion of slave labor (because prisoners can legally be used as slaves) that have no legal means to resist abuse and exploitation would fix that situation right up.
Anyone who can’t keep up with the numerous corporate money vacuums in their lives (rent, rent increases, bills, bill increases, taxes, more taxes, more bill increases, grocery cost increases, more utility increases, more more more) will become homeless, and the homeless will serve as our new pool of slave labor for dirt cheap. Keep up, hustle harder, pay more, pay faster, or be put in chains and tortured in solitary confinement with moldy nutriloaf until you agree to work to death for nothing.
This conservative wet dream is coming unless we collectively pull our heads out of our asses.
The real reason is that conservative ideology dictates that society will have winners and losers who end up in the correct spot in the heirarchy if society doesn’t interfere with the natural sorting.
So it follows that homeless people don’t deserve a “handout” or a leg-up just because they squandered their opportunities.
Leftists think that an ideology follows from a moral interrogation of the world as it should be, whereas reactionaries think the highest good is done by ensuring that people are in their correct spot in the heirarchy in relation to others; since some people are inevitably going to be homeless, there isn’t much to be done about it and the leftists complaining about it are just virtue signaling to get votes.
Their justification is irrelevant once you realize the actual ideological reasoning.
Edit: I’m confused by the downvotes. Anyone want to tell me how I’m wrong? This isn’t my ideology, but I think it’s useful to understand your opposition on more than a cartoon-villain level, especially since they are so effective at selling their ideas to low-information voters.
I think you weren’t clear in delineation between leftist and reactionaries.
Ah, that makes sense. Thanks!
“That includes California, which is home to one-third of the country’s homeless population.”
Why do these statements never follow immediately stating that California is also 10% of the ENTIRE country’s population and it’s where all of the livable weather is if you have no option but to sleep outside. Of course a lot of them are in California. We need a new deal.
Eh, it’s not just the weather. It’s cities in general. Look at Philly. Winter sucks there but still tons of homeless.
California, outside be mountains, doesn’t really get winters. It’s an attractive place and people will do train hopping to get there.
It’'s not just the big cities with homeless problems, it’s basically everywhere that’s not RURAL, and even then you still see them
When other places send them here, it’s gonna be a problem
Agreed.
Denver has plenty of homeless too, but come on. It’s nowhere near California-levels.
I see people living homeless outside in New England daily, even in the winter. That discrepancy has to be fed by more than just weather.
What discrepancy?
Are you implying that the presence of any homeless people in New England invalidates the idea that consistently favorable weather leads to a higher ratio of homeless people living in an area?
Probably also matters long term vs short term. When someone first becomes homeless, it usually happens where they were already living regardless of the weather. Over time, people may move to where it is more comfortable to sleep outside.
So, all cities have new homeless people plus some that just never leave. And then warm areas have new homeless people plus the long term homeless people who risked traveling to get to warmer temperatures.
I could have been more clear on that. If 1/3 of homeless live in CA and CA makes up 1/10 the population, then CA has disproportionately high homeless population as compared the other states.
I was get at the point that there isn’t one cause for CA having this disparity, another commenter pointed out housing prices for one example. And that other parts of the country, even ones with harsh seasons, are still livable albeit not as hospitable.
Isn’t the average home price in California more than double the average of New England?
True, but also the consequences of living homeless in New England would force you to either come up with some kind of way to afford shelter or move south. Whereas more homeless people die on the streets in California than you might expect, but the perception is that you can live outdoors safely all year. So there’s less incentive to scrape together enough money for a home.
Add to that, very few people move to New England with a crazy idealistic view of their opportunities to make it big. If they move there at all, it’s because they have a job lined up. Dreamers crash and burn in California every day.
In case you ever need led hardproof that America is not a Christian Nation.
Feels pretty spot on for the Christians in the church I went to as a child
But the Church will help! Our doors are always open! With strings attached, of course.
Trying to decide if the war is on homelessness or on the homeless. 🤔
Why decide when you can just make it illegal to be homeless?
If we make it illegal to be homeless, everyone will have a home! It’s brilliant!
We have more empty homes than we do the homeless. If this country wanted a war on homelessness, it’d be over in a year. And that’s just the time it’d take to organize the moves. It isn’t even entirely correct to say this is a war on the homeless, either. It’s much broader than that and this conflict has been going on since time immemorial.
This is the class war and we’re losing.
Literally? Both
Sounds like the solution is for the homeless people to protest by refusing to sleep in shelters, forcing the police to arrest them all, overcrowding the jails and clogging the court system until the entire system grinds to a standstill.
So what do I know, I haven’t been homeless in 15 years
Jail = free labour
Shelter = help
Jail = makes $$$
Help = costs $
The math is clear.
Sounds like this will inevitably happen anyway. It’s not like they are bussing homeless people to Colorado are they?
No actually, I am asking are they doing that, because I can see them doing that.
All the old Marijuana convictions being overturned means the corporate prison system has a shortage of free labor. Seems like jailing the homeless puts them back on top. Big Brain SCOTUS. /s
Well now this really makes for a trio of facts that paint a horrifying picture:
- Private, for profit prisons exist
- Prison slave labour is legal
- Homelessness can now be made illegal
Guess I should buy some stocks in companies that use prison labour.
- Verizon uses inmates to provide telecommunication services.
- Fidelity Investments uses some held assets to fund the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an organization that promotes inmate work.
- Kmart and JCPenney use inmate labor in Tennessee to make denim products.
- Walmart uses prison labor to clean barcodes so products can be resold.
- Some cheese and fish from Whole Foods comes from prison labor.
- Circuit boards from IBM come from Texas prisoners.
- Wendy’s and McDonald’s use prison labor to process beef for their food products.
- Amazon uses BOP labor for cleaning and sorting damaged goods
Also Idaho potatoes are largely prison labor. McD’s and Five Guys buy a lot of them
Idaho only has prisoners, potatoes, and gun-totin’ white supremacists.
What else are they gonna do?
I thought Kmart went out of business?
Add Raytheon to that list.
Edit: Downvoted for stating a fact…
Anecdotes aside, prison stocks skyrocketed after Trump’s election. Anybody wonder why?
The fact that prisons have stocks…
Back in my day, the stocks were kept in the public square.
Because Hilary campaigned on banning private prisons which caused their stocks to collapse for a year until she lost.
Forcing people into shelters or jail is super fucked up. If I decide I want to camp out in a tent and remove myself from the capitalist grind I should be able to do it unmolested. These fucking vampires think they own every grain of sand.
So, where are they supposed to sleep? In a jail cell?
Yep! That way they can be used for slave labor for the owner class.
As well as to extract tax money from the working class. As it makes more economic sense to house and rehabilitate a person then it does to put them in jail. But the jail tends to have more kickbacks for the owner class.
Yes, and without what meager belongings they had prior to arrest. Any changes of clothes, tent, coats, bicycle, all gone.
In the case of CA, these people are going to be given in shelter beds. (I know, it sounds counterintuitive to the ruling.)
The main reason CA brought the case is because they aren’t allowed force portions of their unhoused populations indoors. They can’t move a segment of the population unless there is enough space for the entire population.
So, if a county had beds for half of the unhoused population, and it wanted to bring half of them indoors, it couldn’t. It could only make moves once it had beds for all.
I’m sure some place will be shitty and will just throw people in jail, but the big west cost cities have a lot of unfilled shelter beds that they would like to fill.
And all that being said, a lot of these unhoused people are avoiding shelters for a reason. Being on the street is actually preferable to what people experience in some shelters. So, as much as Newsom will tell you that he wants to be compassionate and give people a bed, he’s not telling you that bed is next to a psycho that’s going to scream all night then assault someone.
I’m seeing people who are very likely homeless walking down busy highways and even the interstate to get to the town where I live, presumably to go to the jobs they still have despite being “lazy homeless people.” Walking down them miles out of town. They must have to walk for 2 or 3 hours minimum just to get to work. It would take them 2 hours to get to the nearest bus stop from where I often see them walking (near a woods where they must be camping).
A significant number of them are Latino, and this town does not have a large native Latino population, making me think they are migrants who ended up homeless after hoping to come to America for a better life.
I assume Republicans think all of that is just fine.
This is the ground work to start mass deportation during project 2025 when Trump wins.
For communities that do this, the goal is to…
A) Drive out the homeless so they go to other, more charitable communities, and become someone else’s problem, and then…
B) Point out the higher rate of homelessness (and higher taxes necessary to deal with it) in those other communities and say, “Look how awful those communities are!”
Or fuel the prison industrial complex sustaining a constant supply of slave labor and state funding for private prisons
This is the one.
I was hoping the ruling was narrow and that nuance would make available solutions to move forward, but no. This is a broad decision that allows criminalizing using a pillow in public (that is part of the law in Grants Pass, which was ruled as acceptable). Justice Sotomayor said it correctly: sleeping is a biological necessity. If you don’t have a place to sleep, you have to choose between not living and going to jail.
They’ll find a way to turn that into prison not jail.
This is really interesting in contrast to where I live in Ontario, Canada. A municipality wanted an injunction to make it crystal clear they could evict a homeless encampment on municipal property. Instead, they got a judgement that doing so would violate those people’s Charter rights. This ruling means basically every municipality in the province now legally has to do something about the homelessness crisis.
Same thing in BC… In the Prince George encapment case, it was ruled that unless there are enough shelter beds that are sufficiently accessible by the affected population, they are allowed to stay in the Lower Patricia encampment.
My opinion has always been governmental spaces, especially those on or near the buildings lawmakers use, should always be an allowed campground for homeless people. They’re the ones most responsible for the problem, they should have to see it every time they go to work.
I’m going to misuse a couple of lines from Star Trek: The Next Generation, but I still think they work. Just imagine Q is all homeless people, and not evil, and Worf is SCOTUS:
Q: What do I have to do to convince you that I’m human?
Worf: Die.
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.
Overall, the dissent is good. But it makes 1 fundamental mistake of constitutional analysis:
The Constitution cannot be evaded by such formalistic distinctions
As I recall, Gavin Newsom has basically been pushing to look at available shelter space, and clear portions of encampments based on that available space. Problem has been, legally, CA couldn’t clear encampments unless it could demonstrate that it had beds for everyone. As a result, CA has a lot of unclaimed shelter beds. Some counties don’t have enough for everyone, but they do have enough to start moving large portions of people inside.
That said, the conversations around this seem to miss one of the fundamental reasons why people are not excited take a shelter bed. Many shelters have been dirty, hostile, or down right unsafe. People have felt safer in tent communities where they could know and chose their neighbors.
I’m of two minds on this. The all or nothing rule on shelter beds was weird, but shelters need to be safe, help people get care, let people keep belongings, and not kick people out every morning at the crack of dawn.
At least here in CA, the government seemed to be following the supreme court’s previous ruling in good faith. I’d bet that they’ll continue pursuing a similar course of action, just with one less technicality.
