Unrealistic, Unconstitutional, And Unhelpful : On Homeless Criminalization

Homelessness is much more than not having a home. Most of the time, homelessness is not having any hope and chance. It is a crisis that continues to impact millions of American people every day. A crisis that gives them no choice but to sit on the streets and try to survive each day with extreme optimism. However, they are being criminally punished for such actions that they have no choice but to do it. The innocuous action of sitting on the streets and sleeping on the streets somehow is viewed as a criminal act. A number of resources wasted for criminalizing such harmless action are gratuitous. The government has two branches of law regarding homelessness in the United States. One branch is helping the homeless people to access shelter, food, and etc. The other branch is outlined to criminalize homeless people. Homeless people who do not have any place to go are forced to live on the streets in order to survive. Criminalizing homeless people reveals that it is actually quite inefficient, expensive, and most importantly it infringes the rights that they are entitled to.

Every New Yorker has the right to a safe and affordable place to live in. New York’s shortage of affordable housing has reached a crisis point. Poor and elderly people throughout New York City are at a greater risk of homelessness and forced low-income residents do not have food or medical care to stay in their homes. A sinful structure of homelessness in New York City is New York’s shortage of affordable housing. Millions of New Yorkers are desperate to find affordable housing and tens of thousands are forced to live either in dirty shelters or on the streets. Recent data indicates that nearly 60,000 people, including more than 23,000 children, stay in the city’s main homeless shelter system (Guelpa). A small amount of poor renter households received a housing subsidy from the local government. Little assistance is being provided which means that most poor families and individuals that seek assistance

Seeing homelessness develop is a process that the older generation can say they have been apart of. The young generation, on the other hand, cannot say they have seen the development of homelessness. People who are thirty years old or younger have grown up believing that homelessness was always part of the landscape. The younger generation has come to believe that there have always been homeless people sitting on park benches. When an individual is asked what they see most in a large city like Chicago or New York, ‘homeless people’ is a common response. According to the United States Census Bureau, 320.8 million individuals currently live in the United States of America. Imagine the proportion of individuals that do not own a car or even a house to live in. The National Law Center on Homelessness and poverty did studied to conclude that in America more than 3.5 million people experience homelessness each year. Those concerned with the issue of homelessness are curious as to what events had to have happened that lead to the individuals living on the streets. The reasons are different for each and every person. Some of the more major issues that contribute to this are lack of affordable housing, declining welfare assistance, and most importantly, mental illness. Resolving the issue of homelessness is very possible with new ways of housing and treatment for the mentally ill. The relation between the homeless and the mental illness has risen, and the United States as a whole

Adoption of laws and policies that punish homeless people rather than addressing the problems that cause homelessness is an ineffective approach. Penalizing people for engaging in innocent behavior – such as sleeping in public, sitting on the sidewalk, or begging – will not reduce the occurrence of these activities or keep homeless people out of public spaces when they have no other place to sleep or sit or no other means of living. With insufficient resources for shelter and services for homeless people, enforce punishment for unavoidable activities is not only pointless, it is inhumane (Brown,1999, July/August). Relying on law enforcement officials and jails to address homelessness and related issues, such as mental illness and substance abuse, that are more appropriately handled by service providers, causes problems and widespread frustrations within the criminal justice system. Police officers are not adequately trained to respond to the situations that arise, the criminal justice system does not provide the necessary treatment

The number of homeless citizens continues to grow throughout the country as well as the number of police officers being pushed to work the cities. Homeless seek refuge in places like shelters while the police correspondingly are trying to help clear the streets of the homeless. Many times shelters are maxed out with the amount of homeless utilizing these facilities and therefore are left trying to seek other options, whereas the police are forced to try and get the homeless out of sight out of mind on the public. As the police push for the homeless to find somewhere new to live each day the

Since the impact of homelessness varies depending on the population and setting people are in, state and local leaders have a greater ability than the federal government to judge what actions need to be taken to help the homeless. Unfortunately, many communities have put more effort into hiding or keeping out people affected by homelessness rather than ending homelessness itself. One example is laws that work against the homeless rather than help them. Not only do these laws discourage the homeless from seeking help but they also discourage agencies and local officials from providing that help. “In recent years, there has been an increase in the enactment of laws and ordinances intended to regulate the activities of the homeless people” (“Dealing

“Supporters of strict laws barring behavior associated with the homeless argue that allowing large numbers of homeless people to commit quality-of-life offenses in urban neighborhoods is unfair to those who work, live, and play in those neighborhoods” (“Homelessness”).Allowing homeless people to linger in communities is unjust to the people who live there and work there. “Proponents of housing first note that the cost of providing homeless people with apartments is far less than the cost of letting them remain on the street” (“Homelessness”).It costs less to house the homeless rather than to let them stay on the street. “Housing first, they contend, has demonstrated that chronically homeless people are not beyond help but just require permanent housing before they can properly address mental or physical disabilities” (“Homelessness”).Housing first will help address a homeless person’s problems and will have permanent housing for the

The National Alliance to End Homelessness, a non-profit organization that voices the issue of homelessness, enlightens, “On a single night in January 2014, 578,424 people were experiencing homelessness – meaning they were sleeping outside or in an emergency shelter or transitional housing program” (The State of Homelessness in America 2015). Staggering statistics similar this inspired Matt Lynch to write his article titled ‘The Homeless Lack a Political Voice, But Not American Ideals’ and it also motivated Anna Quindlen to express her emotions in ‘Homeless.’ Both articles posed by Lynch and Quindlen contain comparative flaws, which range from logical fallacies to the utilization of unfair information. Each writing, however, incorporates multiple pieces of significant information relative to the topic at hand, yet Lynch’s work manages to pull ahead with the addition of minor, yet important, details that Quindlen failed to propose.

One of the most discussed topics around the world is homelessness. Each and everyday more and more people become homeless. People around the world have tried numerous times to resolve this dilemma. This situation is growing and it 's starting to spiral out of control. One solution that 's getting popular the more we let this situation grow is that criminalizing the homeless is good. People cannot criminalize the homeless. Homeless people should not be criminalized because they have nowhere to go, they have it hard enough, and putting them in jail will solve nothing.

Did you know that Applied Survey Research counted a total of 4,539 homeless people last year in Sonoma County alone? I can vouch for the authenticity and methods used in this survey because I assisted as a counter. I am passionate about the social issue of homelessness, mainly because I was part of this population a decade ago. Applied Survey Research defines homelessness in part as, “An individual who lacks a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence…” The sad fact is that there are not enough resources to adequately shelter America’s most vulnerable citizens. Many cities have passed ordinances that have criminalized homelessness. These so called quality of life ordinances are meant to protect the society at large. Homeless people

Last month, the Obama administration released a plan designed to end homelessness in 10 years. The goal reflects new optimism among academics and advocates that homelessness is not an intractable feature of urban life, as it has sometimes seemed, but a problem that can be solved. This belief is fueled by recent research debunking a number of long-standing myths about homelessness in America -- and showing that many of our old policies were unwittingly making the problem worse.

The research paper addresses the selected community members of Great Falls, MT and the rates of incarceration and homelessness, as well as the affects of their long term spiritual and developmental state. Homelessness and incarceration rates are typically linked to one another in several aspects incliding the increasing numbers of people leaving carceral institations facing the increased risk of homelsessness, and how persons experiencing homelessness are vulnerable to incarceration. This paper will review efforts made to adress reentry issues and review research resunts on studies of homelessness among prison and jail populations and research on incarceration among people who are homeless. After reviewing common barriers to housing for people

Beginning with a thoughtful quotation from John Galbraith, “We associate truth with convenience” (86). Through this hook, Galbraith points out a flaw in modern human psychology; people believe whatever readily presents itself to them, so long as it does not interfere with their social or economic standing. Thus, the very beginning of the chapter presents a thought provoking concept which foreshadows the rest of the chapter. In accordance to the subject that Levitt presents, the author goes on to provide faulty statistics delivered by a plethora of people from homelessness experts, to women's rights activists, to police departments. Mitch Snyder, an apparent expert in homelessness claims that “45 homeless people die each second” (86). An erroneous fact such as Snyder’s is perfect for Steven Levitt to sink his teeth into. Levitt bombards this false fact with hypothetical statistics. According to Levitt, Snyder's statement “would mean a whopping 1.4 billion dead homeless every year,” (86) and conceding that Snyder may have misspoke and meant one death every forty-five seconds, Levitt argues, “That’s still 701,000 dead homeless people every year—roughly one-third of all deaths in the United States. Hmm” (86). The point behind this issue is that people believed Snyder because his statistics were easily accessible, and the fact

New York city’s population is 8.5 million, one in one hundred and forty-seven New Yorkers are currently homeless. it is estimated that 58,000 homeless men, women and children sleep in homeless shelters and at least 3,100 sleep in the streets during winter. (Bowery). By looking at the sociological impact of homelessness, I will argue that New York city’s greatest problem is homelessness.

In addition to Hazel story, news of the poorest city in America, Camden, New Jersey, has also risen. The federal government requires all states to have a homeless count every other year in order to fund homeless services, and this year in Camden, CNN brought homelessness into the spotlight. CNN interviewed with Michael Powell, a homeless man who lives on the outskirts of one of the “tent cities” that surveyors often find, and discovered that Michael Powell, and some others, had never been accounted for in the homeless count. In fact, Michael Powell did not know that a count even existed. “’It's set up to be kind of an impossible task,’ said Maria Foscarinis, founder of the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. She said one way to get more accurate findings would be to extend the count over a longer period of time or to do multiple counts per year.” (Ellis 1) However, this may never happen because federal assistance and programs that provide assistance to the needy are experiencing cuts in their fund.