By Timothy Scalona, JHBL Staff Member
Denise Hagan, a homeless resident of Sacramento, California, told shelter staff she would die if she did not receive shelter.[1] Days later, temperatures in the city plummeted to a level that could cause hypothermia, but the city failed to open public buildings to provide the homeless shelter.[2] Shortly thereafter, Denise Hagan was found at a bus stop – frozen to death outside a hospital.[3] Across the country, David Saldana, a homeless resident of St Louis, Missouri, sat on a street curb.[4] His life was cut short when another man walked up to him from behind and executed him in cold blood, simply because he and the man had a verbal dispute at a gas station earlier in the day.[5] These victims are not faceless; they are people with hopes, dreams, and loves ones, whose lives were snuffed out by systems designed to impede their existence.[6]
As the homeless navigate unsafe living conditions amongst communities that believe them to be disposable, they are subjected to physical violence, injury, and illness.[7] Specifically, they endure high rates of robbery, sexual assault, and sleep deprivation.[8] Outside weather conditions subject them to frequent heat stroke or frostbite.[9] They face high exposure to communicable diseases, such as respiratory illnesses and the flu.[10] Furthermore, the homeless are disproportionately exposed to other health issues, such as degenerative joint disease and venereal diseases.[11] They also suffer from high rates of mental illness, such as depression and anxiety, due to the trauma of housing insecurity, food insecurity, and violence.[12] Nearly half of all unhoused people suffer from depression in the United States, as compared with 8% of housed people.
Because homeless people often lack sufficient healthcare access, their exposure to a minor health issue can turn into a serious illness, impairing later treatment of the condition.[13] For example, if they are injured because of violence or an accident, their wounds do not heal properly because they cannot clean their wounds, bathe, or rest frequently on the streets.[14] Cuts or common colds can develop into infections or pneumonia, respectively.[15] Street and overcrowded shelter conditions regularly compromise the health conditions of the homeless.[16] The little medical services they do receive do not have lasting benefits when they are forced to return to the same unhoused conditions after treatment, restarting the cycle.[17] Furthermore, without a safe place to store medications, chronic medical conditions, like hypertension and diabetes, are exacerbated.[18] Subsequently, 50% of unhoused people suffer from hypertension and 20% suffer from diabetes; comparatively, only 29% of housed people suffer from hypertension and 18% suffer from diabetes.[19] The homeless often cycle in and out of emergency rooms due to poor health, high stress, dangerous environments, and limited food access.[20] Each night, more than 500,000 people sleep on the streets, enduring these horrific conditions.[21]
As if that was not enough, however, many communities have made illegal the very strategies that the homeless must utilize to survive.[22] Cities regularly arrest and ticket unhoused people for performing “life sustaining activities,” such as sleeping and sitting in public places, even when there are no available alternatives.[23]
For example, Heather, a 58-year-old woman, worked all her life but became injured at her job to a point that she could not leave her bed without pain.[24] She ran out of sick leave, and without an income source, soon became homeless.[25] After staying with friends and in shelters for years, she exhausted her options, and had to live on the streets.[26] Holding a sign which stated, “I’m homeless. Please help,” she was arrested for loitering and panhandling.[27] Later, having been forced to walk through her city without fresh socks, her feet became bloodied and blistered; when she decided to take refuge on a bench and a curb to alleviate this pain, she was again arrested for loitering.[28] Instead of helping Heather become rehoused after she fell into poverty, she was punished for it.[29]
A National Homelessness Law Center study of 187 cities found a notable rise in policies criminalizing necessary human activities.[30] Specifically, they found that 33% of cities prohibit camping in public and 39% prohibit sleeping in vehicles.[31] 18% prohibit sleeping in public and 47% ban sitting or lying down in public.[32] Furthermore, 27% of cities prohibit panhandling. Between 2006 and 2018, the prevalence of these policies in U.S. cities increased dramatically.[33]
Furthermore, without any other available and safe shelter alternatives, many homeless people sleep in homeless encampments: outdoor locations hosted by “tents, shanties, or shacks, where two or more individuals live.”[34] Cities, however, often permit police to remove the homeless from these public encampments, destroying what little shelter, belongings, and important documents they have without notice.[35]
These policies, collectively, exist to punish and push the homeless out of sight.[36] Police enforcement of these policies leads the homeless to seek out hidden sleeping locations, leading to higher rates of robbery, sexual assault, and physical assault.[37] It also often causes them to forgo the use of tents or blankets for shelter, leading to higher rates of frostbite, dehydration, and heat stroke.[38] Frequently woken up by the police, they receive often receive less than four hours of uninterrupted sleep per night.[39] In sum, these criminalization policies fail to address the conditions underlying the homelessness crisis, such as housing access, and instead exacerbate the health and economic consequences of homelessness.[40]
While these laws violate the civil and human rights of the homeless, the court system has been largely silent in condemning these practices.[41] Cities are allowed to prohibit camping, sleeping, sitting, or begging in public and to conduct encampment raids with little judicial resistance.[42] The most notable ruling on the subject came out of the Ninth Circuit, which ruled that a municipality’s attempt to criminalize sleeping, sitting, or lying in public outdoors constitutes cruel and unusual punishment where there is no available shelter alternative, and is therefore unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment.[43] Recently, a federal judge concluded that Alabama statutes that criminalized soliciting donations and begging violated the First Amendment, issuing a permanent injunction against the enforcement of these laws.[44] The few court rulings that restrict these practices, however, are limited in scope and only apply to a small number of states.[45]
To address the homelessness crisis, policymakers must forgo the use of criminalization policies and invest in the resources which help the homelessness to become rehoused, such as housing, which will help them to avoid the detrimental health consequences of housing insecurity.[46] The court system must also step up to ban these state and local criminalization policies, thereby affirming that these practices violate the civil and human rights of homeless communities. Until communities invest in housing and supportive resources instead of resorting to arrest and incarceration, the homelessness crisis will continue. Without taking these steps, these anti-homelessness policies will continue to inflict grave, life-changing, harm on the victims of homelessness. The blood of the human beings whom die as a result of the anti-homeless criminalization policies rests on the policymakers who create such violent policies and on the system that allows them to do so without resistance.
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are the views of the author alone and do not represent the views of JHBL or Suffolk University Law School.
Timothy Scalona is J.D. Candidate at Suffolk University Law School. He received a Master of Public Policy from the University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass) in 2021. Furthermore, he received Bachelor of Arts degrees in Political Science and in Policy, Journalism, & Storytelling, from UMass in 2020. Scalona is an activist and survivor of homelessness who has written opinion articles for the Washington Post and the Boston Globe on the homelessness crisis in the United States. He is a current board member at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. Upon graduation, he would like to serve as an eviction defense attorney or as a public defender.
Sources
[1] See Theresa Clift, A third unhoused Sacramentan has frozen to death this winter. Here’s what happened, Sacramento Bee (Mar. 21, 2023), https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article273139875.html (reporting rising deaths of unhoused people in Sacramento, California).
[2] See id. (describing temperature of city in November 2023 and resulting consequences).
[3] See id.
[4] See Eduardo Medina, Man Arrested in Brazen Sidewalk Killing in St. Louis That Was Captured on Video, N.Y. Times (Mar. 1, 2023), https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/01/us/st-louis-man-shot.html (reporting murder of a homeless man, David Saldana, in St. Louis).
[5] See id.
[6] See Tim Mercer, Opinion, There are Humans Behind the Homelessness, Univ. Tex. News (Nov. 25, 2019), https://news.utexas.edu/2019/11/25/there-are-humans-behind-the-homelessness/ (describing humanity and stories of people experiencing homelessness).
[7] See, Tony Robinson & Marisa Westbrook, Unhealthy by Design: Public Health Consequences of Denver’s Criminalization of Homelessness 8 (2019) (describing physical harm associated with street homelessness).
[8] See id.
[9] See id.
[10] See id.
[11] See Committee on Health Care for Homeless People, Institute of Medicine, Homelessness, Health, and Human Needs 41 (describing unhoused peoples’ disproportionate exposure to disease).
[12] See id. at 51 (National Academies Press, 1988) (explaining mental health challenges resulting from trauma of homelessness).
[13] See id. See also Travis P. Baggett et al., The Unmet Health Care Needs of Homeless Adults: A National Study, 100 Am. J. of Pub. Health 1326, 1326 (2010) (describing how homeless people often have limited healthcare access).
[14] See National Health Care For The Homeless Council, Homelessness & Health: What Is The Connection 1 (2019) (describing health issues exacerbated by street homelessness).
[15] See id.
[16] See id. at 2.
[17] See id.
[18] See id.
[19] See National Health Care For The Homeless Council, Homelessness & Health: What Is The Connection 2 (2019) (describing health disparities between unhoused and housed people).
[20] See id.
[21] End homelessness, State of Homelessness: 2022 Edition (2022) (providing homelessness statistics as of January 2020).
[22] See National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, Housing not Handcuffs: Ending The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities 9 (2019) (describing prevalence of laws criminalizing homelessness).
[23] See id. (describing specific criminalization strategies).
[24] See Soc. Work Today, https://www.socialworktoday.com/archive/exc_0518.shtml (last visited Mar. 23, 2023) (describing story of woman experiencing homelessness).
[25] See id.
[26] See id.
[27] See id.
[28] See id.
[29] See Soc. Work Today, https://www.socialworktoday.com/archive/exc_0518.shtml (last visited Mar. 23, 2023) (describing criminalization of women who fell into homelessness).
[30] See National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, Housing not Handcuffs: Ending The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities 9-10 (2019) (describing prevalence of laws criminalizing homelessness).
[31] See id.
[32] See id.
[33] See National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, Housing not Handcuffs: Ending The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities 10-11 (2019). Since 2006, bans on camping in public have increased by 69% and bans on sitting and lying down in public have increased by 52%. Id. Similarly, bans on panhandling have increased by 69%, bans on sleeping in vehicles have increased by 143%, and bans on sleeping in public have increased by 31%. Id.
[34] Homeless Hub, https://www.homelesshub.ca/blog/home-where-heart-homeless-encampments-temporary-solution-housing-crisis (last visited Mar. 23, 2023).
[35] See National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, Housing not Handcuffs: Ending The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities 9 (2019) (describing consequences of encampment sweeps).
[36] See Eric S. Tars, National Homelessness Law Center, Criminalization of Homelessness 1 (2021) (describing intent of criminalization policies).
[37] See Tony Robinson & Marisa Westbrook, Unhealthy by Design: Public Health Consequences of Denver’s Criminalization of Homelessness 8 (2019) (describing risk of violence and illness faced by unhoused people).
[38] See id. at 9 (describing environmental hazards relevant to police enforcing criminalization policies).
[39] See id.
[40] See Coalition on Homelessness San Francisco, Punishing the Poorest: How the Criminalization of Homelessness Perpetuates Poverty in San Francisco 1-3 (2015) (demonstrating how criminalization policies prevent homeless people from accessing economic support programs).
[41] See generally Sara K. Rankin, Civilly Criminalizing Homelessness, 56 Harv. C.R.-C.L. L. Rev. 368, 412 (1991). “Currently, neither the courts nor the legislature adequately protect people experiencing homelessness from persecution.” Id.
[42] See id.
[43] See Martin v. Boise, 920 F. 3d. 584 (9th Cir. 2017) (concluding ordinance violated Eighth Amendment).
[44] See S. Poverty L. Ctr., https://www.splcenter.org/news/2023/03/14/alabama-law-solicitation-donation-unconstitutional (last visited Mar. 23, 2023).
[45] From the Square, https://www.fromthesquare.org/the-united-states-long-history-of-criminalizing-homelessness/ (last visited Mar. 23, 2023) (explaining limitations of existing caselaw).
[46] See National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, Housing not Handcuffs: Ending The Criminalization of Homelessness in U.S. Cities 95 (2019) (calling for investment into social programs instead of criminalization policies to address homelessness).