Letter: Being homeless shouldn't be considered a crime

From: http://www.chicoer.com/article/NA/20180203/LOCAL1/180209903

The honorable response to homelessness is to build 500,000 affordable housing units and employ social workers to assist people struggling with mental illness, brain injuries, PTSD, addiction, etc. (Housing First.) All other approaches are nonsolutions — with some being less honorable than others. Enter the proposed “community court.”

I won’t speak to the probable erosion of civil liberties with respect to those facing a quasi-court without legal advocacy, but only to the question of whether such a court is an appropriate response to poverty, disability and a shelter crisis: It isn’t.

We’ve criminalized sleeping (camping), public urination (with restroom access denied), leaving carts unattended, etc. The homeless are therefore criminals by virtue of their shelterless existence. No community court can conjure affordable housing. Instead, for faux-crimes like sleeping, indigent people will be asked to pay a “debt to society.” A burden of indebtedness, incurred by surviving in the public space, could accrue only in an unjust society.

It’s not difficult to envision how this court would work hand-in-glove with the Jesus Center plan for soft-incarceration in a Robert Marbut-style, centralized intake facility. Our ongoing failure to implement an honorable solution is taking a toll, not only on our Constitution, but on our conception of charity.

Homeless advocates support affordable housing, as well as “right to rest” laws, restroom access and repeal of flatly unconstitutional “storage” ordinances. No ally of the homeless would support a kangaroo court, with criminalization of homelessness as a central element.

— Patrick Newman, Chico