466

The Supreme Court Is on the Verge of Criminalizing Homelessness (newrepublic.com)

submitted 5 months ago by gAlienLifeform@lemmy.world to c/politics@lemmy.world

80 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

Archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20240223125412/https://newrepublic.com/article/178678/supreme-court-criminalize-homeless-case

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[-] Norgur@kbin.social 99 points 5 months ago

Got a problem? Just make it illegal! Bam! Solved!

Next up: Not finding a job is going to become illegal, thus solving unemployment issues!

[-] cmoney@lemmy.world 41 points 5 months ago

Just make crime illegal.

[-] Norgur@kbin.social 16 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

But that would make 3/4 of all politicians just disappear. Huh... come to think of it, we should do it!

[-] Alexstarfire@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

I think your number is a little low.

[-] chakan2@lemmy.world 17 points 5 months ago

They did that already...they tied healthcare to being employed.

[-] kandoh@reddthat.com 16 points 5 months ago

Conservatives can't understand why we did away with debtors prison.

[-] Smoogs@lemmy.world 6 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] Maggoty@lemmy.world 5 points 5 months ago

Oh no the stock market will do just fine when we create different tiers of ~~work camp~~ prison with different suppliers. There'll just be less variety in stocks.

[-] SoylentBlake@lemm.ee 3 points 5 months ago

“Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison.”

Hank the-one-man-think-tank Thoreau

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.

[-] Maggoty@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago

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!

[-] SoylentBlake@lemm.ee 2 points 5 months ago

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.

[-] GraniteM@lemmy.world 7 points 5 months ago

If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.

—Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government

[-] Norgur@kbin.social 1 points 5 months ago

Prohibition anyone?

[-] blanketswithsmallpox@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

Right wing terrorism!... Wait...

this post was submitted on 23 Feb 2024

466 points (98.9% liked)

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