Written by Eric Tars, Senior Attorney, National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. Last Tuesday, September 4, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that people experiencing homelessness cannot be punished for sleeping outside in the absence of adequate alternatives. The […]
Category: Criminalization
Time for Change: Findings from the SPARC Study on Race and Homelessness
This guest post was written by Jeffrey Olivet and Marc Dones, lead authors of Supporting Partnerships for Anti-Racist Communities Phase One Report. In recent years, an increasingly urgent dialogue has emerged around race and equity in America. But that dialogue has generally overlooked […]
Homelessness and Incarceration Are Intimately Linked. New Federal Funding is Available to Reduce the Harm of Both.
Homelessness is intimately linked with the criminal and juvenile justice systems. Almost 50,000 people a year enter homeless shelters immediately after exiting incarceration. And people returning from jail or prison face barriers to finding stable housing and employment due to […]
Don’t Criminalize Homelessness. End It.
Say you’re homeless and you live in a city with a growing homeless population. At night, the shelters may be crowded or filled, and during the day the shelters don’t provide a place to sleep. You're exhausted and have to sleep somewhere, but you have no options. What do you do?
Every day and every night, thousands of homeless people find themselves in this very situation. So they find a park or a place on a sidewalk or somewhere else not fit for human habitation. They do the best they can to make themselves comfortable and they fall asleep. Should that be a crime?