The Supreme Court Is on the Verge of Criminalizing Homelessness
As more people end up experiencing homelessness, they’re also facing increasingly punitive and reactionary responses from local governments and their neighbors. Such policies could become legally codified in short order, with the high court having agreed to hear arguments in Grants Pass v. Johnson.
Originally brought in 2018, the case challenged the city of Grants Pass, Oregon, over an ordinance banning camping. Both a federal judge and, later, a panel from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck the law down, saying that Grants Pass did not have enough available shelter to offer homeless people. As such, the law was deemed to be a violation of the Eighth Amendment.
The ruling backed up the Ninth Circuit’s earlier ruling on the Martin v. City of Boise case, which said that punishing or arresting people for camping in public when there are no available shelter beds to take them to instead constituted a violation of the “cruel and unusual punishment” clause in the Eighth Amendment. That applied to localities in the Ninth Circuit’s area of concern and has led to greater legal scrutiny even as cities and counties push for more punitive and restrictive anti-camping laws. In fact, Grants Pass pushed to get the Supreme Court to hear the case, and several nominally liberal cities and states on the West Coast are backing its argument. If the Supreme Court overturns the previous Grants Pass and Boise rulings, it would open the door for cities, states, and counties to essentially criminalize being unhoused on a massive scale.
Got a problem? Just make it illegal! Bam! Solved!
Next up: Not finding a job is going to become illegal, thus solving unemployment issues!
Just make crime illegal.
But that would make 3/4 of all politicians just disappear. Huh... come to think of it, we should do it!
I think your number is a little low.
They did that already...they tied healthcare to being employed.
Conservatives can't understand why we did away with debtors prison.
They’ll start to notice when there’s a downturn in their stock earnings due to imprisoning everyone. They have to feel it personally before they take issue with such problems. They don’t have a very far attention span.
Oh no the stock market will do just fine when we create different tiers of
work campprison with different suppliers. There'll just be less variety in stocks.“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”
They'll have just invested in the newly expanded private prison system then.
Things gonna be a money maker, all that free labor...and if you refuse to work they tack on YEARS extra.
Man that's gonna make for some spicy prison riots.
I hate to say this but they're going to find out the hard way that most of the homeless veterans are that way by choice and they remember how to fight in an organized manner. Our very own hometown militarized gangs! Yay!
We all knew that was part of the endgame, c'mon now. This will probably only surprise them, since, y'know, they don't know anyone who's ever served before.
—Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government
Prohibition anyone?
Right wing terrorism!... Wait...
Gun control in a nutshell.
I’ll take false equivalency for 500, Alex!
How is it a false equivalent?
Because gun control is a solution to another problem. The problem isn't that guns exist, but that people die because guns are too prevalent. My original comment explicitly made fun of "just make the systemic problem illegal", somthe real equivalency would be "too many shootings, so make killing illegal and call the problem solved". You falsely adopted this to express your disbelief that a proposed measure to curb gun violence is effective which is not the same but was described as the same by you.