Anti-Homelessness in Our Cities

The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty (NLCHP) and the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) released a report last week, Homes Not Handcuffs, tracking the criminalization of homelessness as a growing trend across the country. The report focuses on specific city measures from 2007 and 2008 that have targeted homeless persons, such as laws that make it illegal to sleep, eat, or sit in public spaces. The report includes information about 273 cities.

Los Angeless is ranked the country's meanest city (for a full article on information about LA read this article from Reuters). Some examples of why are:
"L.A.'s so-called Safer City Initiative was singled out in the groups' report as the most egregious example of policies and practices nationwide that essentially punish people for failing to have a roof over their heads.

Others include making it illegal to sleep, sit or store personal belongings on sidewalks and other public spaces; prohibitions against panhandling or begging; and selective enforcement of petty offenses like jaywalking and loitering."

Across the board, though, according to their survey:

• 33% prohibit “camping” in particular public places in the city and 17% have citywide prohibitions on “camping.”
• 30% prohibit sitting/lying in certain public places.
• 47% prohibit loitering in particular public areas and 19% prohibit loitering citywide.
• 47% prohibit begging in particular public places; 49% prohibit aggressive panhandling and 23% have citywide prohibitions on begging.
The trend of criminalizing homelessness continues to grow. Based on information gathered about the 224 cities that were included in our prohibited conduct charts in both our 2006 report and this report:

• There has been a 7% increase in laws prohibiting “camping” in particular public places.
• There has been an 11% increase in laws prohibiting loitering in particular public places.
• There has been a 6% increase in laws prohibiting begging in particular public places and a 5% increase in laws prohibiting aggressive panhandling.

The resulting legal penalties compound other barriers, say the report's authors, since a criminal record makes it even harder for a homeless person to reemerge from destitution. As more formerly working- and middle-class families spiral toward homelessness, the irony of these “quality of life” ordinances grows starker.

But the criminalization of the homeless, who happen to be disproportionately people of color, isn't just an unfortunate sign of the times.

For a more detailed report from Racewire read here.

HOW INCARCERATION AFFECTS THE JOB MARKET

From Racewire:

Millions of people leave jails and prisons every year and that number is about to grow. Citing unconstitutional health conditions, a panel of federal judges on Monday told the state of California to reduce prison overcrowding by 55,000 people, about a third of the total state prison population, over the next three years.

If the ruling holds up to appeal, tens of thousands of people, overwhelmingly Black and Latino, could return to their communities. {…}

The White House has appropriately put creating and saving jobs at the center of the stimulus plan. But for people with criminal records, the prospects of inclusion in the national recovery are dismal. It’s not enough to create a job when a quick criminal background check will result in so many people losing it or not getting it at all. Those with prior convictions will be excluded from the game before the starting whistle sounds.

Communities of color experience higher rates of joblessness. This is due in part to the damning mix of the stigma of having a criminal record, the assumption that ex-prisoners can never redeem themselves, the ensuing ban on public employment for people with felony convictions and the practice of employers doing background checks.

According to Princeton sociologist Devah Pager, joblessness among former prisoners after a year is somewhere around 75 percent -- three times the level among the same population before incarceration. The trend toward never-ending punishment, even after people have served their time, infects communities of color, especially Black people, with particular venom.

Consider, for example, the subprime mortgage crisis. It could not have occurred without a whole population of people of color whose economic and political vulnerability made them easy targets for exploitative loan products, which eventually spread out to other homeowners and took down the entire mortgage industry. And that kind of inequity is growing. In January Black and Latino unemployment was 12.6 and 9.7 percent respectively, compared to 6.9 percent for whites. Black and Latino poverty is close to 3 times that of whites. To get this economy moving again, we need people working, spending and paying taxes.

Fixing inequity is a prerequisite for constructing a healthy and just economy. As historians tell us, massive inequity preceded and contributed to the Great Depression. Removing concrete barriers to employment is one step in that direction. As we are implementing this stimulus plan, we should at the very least expunge the records of people with non-violent convictions, as the state of Illinois did in 2005. We should also severely limit employers’ rights to conduct criminal background checks, especially in situations like Vincent’s, whose employer routinely used them to keep the workforce temporary and insecure.

Vincent’s story:


For more about just jobs and private- versus public-sector impacts on poverty wages, read here

Judges Plead Guilty to Jailing Youths for Profit

You can't make this shit up. And just when I was feeling optimistic...

“I felt like I had been thrown into some surreal sort of nightmare,” said Hillary, 17, who was sentenced in 2007. “All I wanted to know was how this could be fair and why the judge would do such a thing.”

My thoughts exactly on the entire scandal that is the PIC. The entire system needs to be abolished. Prison abolition, please. Now.

It's time for change - I'm feeling optimistic

In these most desperate of times change may be coming.

Attempts to control youth are failing!! Twelve young people in Mass juvenile prisons may be liberated after the Supreme Judicial Court "struck down a law that allowed the state to keep juvenile offenders in custody for three years after they turned 18, if officials believed they would be "physically dangerous to the public.'"(read more here)
Also, even though youth curfews exist in neighboring cities and towns, a youth curfew has been overturned in Oakland after massive resistance to the mass criminalization of young people. (News report here)

AND KIDS WILL GET HEALTHCARE!! And President Obama signed the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act, expanding the SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program ) health insurance program for children of low-income families and enabling states to provide an additional 4 million children with health insurance.

Senate: Yea-66, Nay-32

House: Yea-290, Nay-135

The bill awaits the president's signature.

In Philadelphia, public schools are considering a new "turnaround” strategy for "chronically underperforming schools, one based on Chicago’s controversial Renaissance 2010 project that closes existing schools and opens new ones under a different management structure." A big part of this proposal involves charter schools which are controversial, but it COULD provide immediate relief to some of the least-resourced schools in the country.
From "The Notebook:

At the proposed “contract schools,” outside managers would have more independence than the private managers currently operating schools under the District’s existing “diverse provider” model – they would be able to employ their own staff, for example.

In addition, some schools – to be called “innovation schools” – would be reconstituted from the ground up with new teachers and leadership, but managed by the District with union teachers.

“Performance schools” would not be reconstituted with new personnel, but like the others would be given more “autonomy” over school management in exchange for “greater accountability."
Complete article here

Women in Iran are protesting for rights and what makes me excited is that this is not imposed from a foreign organization but rather from "the people" themselves:
"Women’s rights advocates say Iranian women are displaying a growing determination to achieve equal status in this conservative Muslim theocracy, where male supremacy is still enscribed in the legal code. One in five marriages now end in divorce, according to government data, a fourfold increase in the past 15 years." (Full NYT article here)

The Obama administration named three people to posts in its intergovernmental affairs office on Friday, including Jodi Archambault Gillette, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The Lakota woman will serve as a deputy associate director in an office that functions as a mediator between the administration and state, tribal and local governments. This is a huge step and the highest position a Native person has held in the U.S. Details here

The Migration Policy Institute’s published a list of 36 recommendations for the Obama administration on immigration. These changes include reassessing the border fence, and ending the criminal prosecution of undocumented immigrants. The hope is that this would give the federal government a chance to look at the actual effectiveness of its enforcement mechanisms. .

From Racewire:
That pragmatism would be a great improvement over the ideologically-driven measures that immigration restrictionists have successfully pushed for the last eight years. The country could stop wasting both resources and human rights credentials in silly projects that distract us from focusing on more serious problems, like human trafficking and terrorism.

The report also recommends a number of changes that would bring due process to the immigration system, including steps that prevent indefinite, unlawful and unsafe detention of migrants. These are mostly administrative, bureaucratic changes, but they will provide relief to real human beings who are now having their border communities torn up by fence construction, being separated from their families, rounded up in raids, and held in detention centers where people are dying. One of the things we should assess is how much these practices generate racial profiling.

[...]

It’s unlikely that the Obama Administration, with enforcement-oriented Janet Napolitano at the helm of Homeland Security, will adopt most of them unless they hear from the call from US residents who aren’t ideologically tied to pushing out immigrants. Conservatives say that they only oppose undocumented immigration, but people on both sides of the debate know that the line between those with papers and without is very thin, that families and communities hold both, and that policies directed at undocumented immigrants inevitably affect the documented too.

LINK to the full RaceWire article

Boston cops may have escorted two gay porn stars to a nightclub - I'm skeptical but if so this might have beeen the most radical police action ... ever? Read about it here

AND MEXICO CITY'S MAYOR IS GIVING OUT VIAGRA TO 'POOR MEN' AGE 60 AND ABOVE. NYT Article here

Racial Profiling

Racial profiling in airports is still at large and the Center for Constitutional Rights recently published findings that showed 80% of people that NYPD questions are Black or Latino/Hispanic.

The report said:
“From 2005 to 2008, approximately 80 percent of total stops made were of Blacks and Latinos, who comprise 25 percent and 28 percent of New York City’s total population, respectively. During this same time period, only approximately 10 percent of stops were of Whites, who comprise 44 percent of the city’s population.

“Results show that Blacks and Latinos are significantly more likely to be stopped by the police than Whites; that Blacks and Latinos are more likely to be frisked after a NYPD-initiated stop than Whites; and that Blacks and Latinos are more likely to have physical force used against them during a NYPD-initiated stop than Whites. Yet the rates of summons and arrests from all stops is not only extremely low, but nearly the same across racial categories.”

(Further analysis from Racewire)

I find this all so interesting. Is profiling really anything to do with security? It's obvious that profiling doesn't really reduce harm or crime - sure it catches 'criminals' sometimes because the very bodies who are profiled are often the same bodies who are automatically constructed as criminals regardless.

It seems to me that profiling is more a way to make certain people feel safe and like they are being protected, while simultaneously reminding certain other people that they are not safe, are not protected, and are seen only as a threat. So profiling is about re-establishing the social order and reinscribing privilege and not about securing anything except white privilege and hegemony.

Reversing Criminalization from the American Journal of Psychiatry

January 2009

"As of June 2007, there were at least 360,000 persons with major psychiatric disorders, and perhaps as many as half a million, in our jails and prisons. With such huge numbers, can we really say that deinstitutionalization has taken place? There numbers underscore a pressing need for reliable hard data about these severely mentally ill persons who have been criminalized. In an article in this issue, Baillargeon et al. provide valuable hard data. They found that inmates with major psychiatric disorders, and especially those with bipolar disorders, had a substantially increased risk of multiple incarceration. Clearly, this study tells us that criminalization is not being reversed... Incarceration poses a number of important problems and obstacles to treatment and rehabilitation. Even when quality psychiatric care is provided, the inmate/patient still has been doubly stigmatized - as both a mentally ill person and a criminal... The correctional facility's overriding need to maintain order and security; as well as its mandate to implement society's priorities of punishment and social control, greatly restricts the facility's ability to establish a therapeutic milieu and provide the necessary interventions for treating mental illness successfully...
"The community treatment of persons with severe mental illness who are or may become offenders has become an increasingly important and urgent issue. Diversion is of little value unless there are community treatment resources to which mentally ill offenders can be diverted. We need a vast expansion of modalities such as assertive community treatment - community-based, sometimes court-ordered, mobile mental health treatment teams that provide an array of treatment, rehabilitation, and housing services that are available 24 hours a day: intensive case management; the ready availability of psychiatric medicines; adequately and appropriately structured and supportive therapeutic housing arrangements; treatment of co-occurring disorders; vocational rehabilitation; and close working relationships between mental health and criminal justice professionals - to name but a few of these needed resources...
"It is essential to facilitate access to psychiatric hospital care for patients who need it. It is important to acknowledge that the community is not necessarily the most benign treatment setting for all mentally ill people at all times. Success in reducing criminalization in this population will require access to hospital care for those who need it, for as long as they need it.
"Currently, a large number of people with severe mental illness receive their acute psychiatric inpatient treatment in the criminal justice system rather than in the mental health system. Clearly, if there were not a shortage of acute inpatient beds in the mental health system, many acutely psychotic persons might not come first to the attention of law enforcement officers, or if they did, they could be transported to acute psychiatric facilities rather than arrested. In most cases, acute psychiatric inpatient treatment should be the responsibility of the mental health system. As Baillargeon et al. point out in their article, acute inpatient beds should be a high priority in community mental health, and lengths of stay should not be unreasonably short.
"Another important resource that can help preevent criminalization is assisted outpatient treatment. Assisted outpatient treatment is court-ordered civil committment that is initiated by the mental health system to ensure that persons with metnal illness and a history of hospitalizations and/or violence participate in services to the community; it is for those who are capable of living in the community with the help of family, frriends, and mental health professionals, but are resistant to psychiatric treatment, including medication. Without such treatment they may relapse and require hospitalization or be arrested, incarcerated, and criinalized. Such at-risk individuals are ordered to participate in outpatient psychiatric treatment with their progress closely monitored by the court..."