Not a Crime to Be Poor by Peter Edelman

Author:Peter Edelman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620971642
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2017-09-15T04:00:00+00:00

HOMELESSNESS

Crime-free ordinances are ways to push people away from their homes and neighborhoods. The homeless, already without a place to live, are increasingly the targets of ordinances and policies to push them out of entire cities.

A surge in new municipal policies concerning homelessness in recent years has had the effect of further criminalizing the poor, people of color, and people with disabilities. Citywide bans have risen significantly on camping in public, begging in public, loitering, loafing, and vagrancy, sitting or lying down in particular public places, and sleeping in vehicles.11 Breaking any of these laws can result in a stint in jail. Over the last decade, citywide bans on camping in public space have increased by 69 percent, on loitering, loafing, and vagrancy by 88 percent, and on living in vehicles by 143 percent.12

No sleeping, no sitting, no eating in public spaces—add these together and it’s clear that many cities just want homeless people to go away. Needless to say, criminalization does nothing to reduce homelessness. The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness said in a 2012 report that “criminalization creates a costly revolving door that circulates individuals experiencing homelessness from the street to the criminal justice system and back.” It is not only costly, it is a “vicious cycle,” says the Center for American Progress. “If an individual convicted of one of these status offenses is unable to pay fines and fees levied as punishment, he can wind up back in jail for nonpayment. And he ends up with a criminal record, which can make it even harder for him to obtain housing and employment and to get back on his feet. As a result, more than half of the homeless population has a history of incarceration.”13 Homeless people are eleven times more likely to be incarcerated than the population as a whole.14

Russell Bartholow epitomized the criminalization of being homeless. During the fifteen years he lived under a bridge in Sacramento, California, he received 190 citations from police, was the defendant in 132 cases, spent 104 days in jail, and was assessed $104,000 in fines. Native American and in foster care as a child and then adopted by his foster mother, Bartholow was a bright student until he sustained a brain injury in a racially motivated attack at school. He was never the same after that. He married and fathered a child but gradually succumbed to drug addiction and paranoia. His wife and son moved away, his mother died, and he ended up living under a bridge. He sought government help from time to time, always unsuccessfully, but was regularly harassed by the police leading to the repeated arrests and incarcerations when he could not pay the assessed fines. It was a vicious cycle.

In 2013 he saw his niece’s name—by then she was a legislative advocate at the Western Center on Law & Poverty—in the local newspaper. They had lost track of each other and were ecstatic to reunite. Jessica Bartholow said, “All his teeth were gone. He’d been set on fire and spent months in the burn unit.

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