Posted on 06/28/2024 8:25:51 PM PDT by BlackFemaleArmyColonel
The Supreme Court decided on Friday that cities can enforce bans on homeless people sleeping outdoors, even in West Coast areas where shelter space is lacking.
The case is the most significant to come before the high court in decades on the issue and comes as a rising number of people in the US are without a permanent place to live.
In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the high court reversed a ruling by a San Francisco-based appeals court that found outdoor sleeping bans amount to cruel and unusual punishment.
The majority found that the 8th Amendment prohibition does not extend to bans on outdoor sleeping bans.
'Homelessness is complex. Its causes are many. So may be the public policy responses required to address it,' Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
I understand the complexity of the issue; but, if you have no money, and you have no place to live, where do you go?
Most homeless are either addicts or have mental illness
The asylums were closed in the 70s and 80s because of corruption and people being abused in them
But this then led to the crazy people being thrown onto the streets
You basically have a rock and a hard place situation
The 9th Circuit had also ruled that if the only shelters available were faith-based, then they didn't even count as an offer of shelter, so homeless people got god-tier rights to steal public spaces and turn them into toilets.
How do you even enforce such a ban when these people have no assets, don’t care about having a record and jail is basically free housing to them (for twice the price to the taxpayer as a hotel)
In warm areas you create a camp of tents far out in the desert.
You pick them up, throw them in vans and drive them there.
You are not arresting them. You are just clearing the city streets because they are a public nuisance.
Easy peasy.
I look forward to seeing our city streets and neighborhoods cleared to homeless. Probably will require a change of government officials as well.
That’s just it: you jail them. It’s the old vagrancy laws reestablished. I’m not saying the governments will use this power wisely; I’m only saying that an outright ban on all methods of forcibly moving people into custody is a bad idea.
That's what the local city councils, the state legislatures, and the Congress have to figure out. This ruling puts the onus back on them to seriously address the problems.
What the Supreme Court ruled was that the eighth amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment doesn't extend rousting people who are in violation of public loitering or "no camping" laws.
The eighth amendment is about putting humane boundaries around the sentencing that comes from sixth and seventh amendment trials. It does not extend to the police enforcing the law at the front-end of the legal process.
It's like saying a speeder who is pulled over by police and given a ticket is being "punished" by getting the ticket. The speeder can go to court to fight the ticket, and if he loses and then pays the fine and gets points on his license, that's the "punishment."
It's like saying that a person who cheats on his taxes and gets audited by the IRS is being "punished" by the audit. No, if the IRS fines the person and refers him for charges, the "punishment" is whatever the court finds after the tax fraud trial.
Someone who is illegally squatting on public streets or parks and denying the taxpayers the use of the streets or parks is not being "punished" by being told to move on.
-PJ
Andwhen the jail is at capacity? Either for reasons of space, or lack of funding.
It turns out that if you are generous with homeless people you get more of them.
If you are mean and nasty with them you get less.
Make sure any quarters provided are unpleasant and far away from everything—and as cheap as possible.
“if you have no money, and you have no place to live, where do you go?”
Learn to sleepwalk.
Your friends or family's house, cheap motel, or get together with other homeless people and get an apartment? There's homelessness because of perverse incentives and a homeless industry complex that exacerbates the issue rather than solve it.
The older I get, the more I recognize the wisdom of not tearing down a fence until you understand why it's there.
The asylums of the late 1800s up to the 1960s were, generally, horrific. They were little more than sanctioned concentration camps for the mentally ill or those with very low intelligence. Places like Dunning in Chicago were described as "a tomb for the living."
That said, attitudes towards those with mental illness and/or addictions are far different now. Some people simply can't live in polite society. Those people *should* be institutionalized and treated with reasonable humaneness and dignity. That's the balancing act.
Go to work, save your money, stay away from drugs and soon, you’ll no longer be homeless.
California/Newsome responded to the problem by throwing $24 billion down the toilet with nothing to show for it.
In my youth (many decades ago) I volunteered at the Danvers Mental Hospital in Danvers, MA.
My biggest surprise was that about 10% of the residents were as sane as anybody on the outside.
They were serious criminals that had claimed mental illness as their defense.
Nowadays the courts have tightened up on that stuff—but it was a thing then.
I remember one inmate who could kick our butts at chess. He was thrilled to have folks to compete with...
;-)
And why do the brits give a shi$.
If you are speeding, you had a choice as to whether to speed or not. You could have avoided the punishment by not speeding. If you cheated on taxes, you chose to do so. You could have avoided the punishment by not cheating.
If you have no money and no place to go, you don’t have the choice as to whether to be homeless or not—at least in the short term. Maybe in the long term, but not in the short term. You are essentially guilty of being poor.
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