231–240 of 291 posts
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Something can be illegal even if cops are not resting everyone who does it. That's the worse situation in fact, when it becomes the sole discretion of individual police officers who to punish.
It's up to elected district attorneys.
At best a DA is an elected official deciding whether or not to enforce a law on the books.
I feel like the outcome of this is unilaterally bad. Most homeless are elderly and mentally Ill. The solutions are institutionalization and retirement housing/pensions but no state did this after Reagan and instead made homelessness an issue to ignore. Faced with the ability to legally incarcerate nearly 600,000 people, states likely won't hesitate to do just that without a second thought. For a country that prides i…
> Faced with the ability to legally incarcerate nearly 600,000 people, states likely won't hesitate to do just that without a second thought. Prisoners cost ~ $40k a year annually in taxes. It's actually cheaper to house them - so I don't think states are going to be gung-ho about doing either.
San Jose CA has a homeless budget of approximately $120M per year. It has 500 beds. That's $240k/bed-year.
Of course, a lot of that $120M does NOT go to those beds, and there are some other facilities, but that $120M isn't all of the spending either.
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Something can be illegal even if cops are not resting everyone who does it. That's the worse situation in fact, when it becomes the sole discretion of individual police officers who to punish.
I totally agree. My point, though, was that being poor isn't illegal. The ruling keeps the jurisdictions for camping in public at the city level, it isn't specific to why someone is camping or broadly about being poor. If cops have to stop enforcing it the laws will eventually be overturned. If cops do enforce it courts and jails will back up, eventually the law would either be dropped or more support would be built…
And note that cops don't have to actually arrest people in order to enforce those laws. They can simply prevent them from sleeping, endlessly.
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I know you're not actually asking for answer but the US spends trillions of dollars a year supporting homeless and otherwise disadvantaged people. There are public programs that exist solely to provide these people the help they need. In most cities something like half the homeless refuse free shelter.
In most cities, free shelter sucks . It's only available on a day by day basis (sometimes requiring waiting in line in a specific place as late as 7 or 8 pm to know if there will be any beds open), or it has weird hours that get in the way of working schedules, or it requires people to participate in religious activities, or it puts everyone in one big room with no safety measures, or it has no way to store even mini…
But fundamentally it seems to me that shelters are just that. Really bad psych wards that no sane homeless person would set their foot in.
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Why not blue cities in blue states? California's governor and San Francisco's mayor praised the decision.[1] [1] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/san-francisco/sf-supre...
Because it's inhumane to treat people as a punishment?
lel
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> Dumb decision Well, what's the alternative? Do you believe all local laws such as "FooBar park closes at dusk" are federally unconstitutional , and that actually enforcing any of them is "cruel and unusual punishment" against people who desire to camp there overnight? Remember: It's perfectly possible to say that certain situations are unlawful/unjust/immoral for other reasons, it's not like "I think it violates th…
In this case, an alternative was the city providing a homeless shelter. The only shelter in town required those staying there to participate in religious activities. So the homeless people had to choose between (1) arrest (2) forced religious participation, or (3) leaving town.
No, in this [court] case an entirely different question was brought before the judges. "City policy shoulda been this other thing instead" was never on the menu of potential answers.
The Supreme Court is--fortunately, for now--not some sort of King Solomon dictator that can jump the rails from "whose baby is this" to "all babies must be fingerprinted by midwives."
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> Faced with the ability to legally incarcerate nearly 600,000 people, states likely won't hesitate to do just that without a second thought. Prisoners cost ~ $40k a year annually in taxes. It's actually cheaper to house them - so I don't think states are going to be gung-ho about doing either.
There's plenty of political support across the US to imprison people, no matter how much it costs. There's almost none to build people housing, even if it's cheap. People are illogical like that.
Sending the poor to use expensive military kit on vulnerable foreign populations and arresting the non compliant is much more profitable than just providing every one of them with shelter and job opportunities. Society doesn't optimize globally for good will, it optimizes locally for profit.
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> Prisoners cost ~ $40k a year annually in taxes. The racket is that many prisions are private for-profit companies. So this is a way to funnel taxpayer money into those corporations. Who in turn are friends and campaign contributors of the politicians who push for more people into prisions. So it all feeds itself and the cost doesn't matter. The more cost, the better (to them).
What is the relevant population of prisoners who could be in a profit system? I have seen that only a small single digit percentage of prisons are for profit. It would be great to estimate the scale of those so I understand if this is a base case or edge.
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You might not, but nobody? There are those that do. There are even TV shows, multiple reality shows for watching people do just that. It’s not easy living for sure but getting a cabin out in the woods and trying to live off the land is totally a thing people do. For a real world example, you don’t go to the woods outside of Seattle because there are unhoused people living there and it's dangerous to go there.
Nobody does. Bear Grylls wouldn't be popular if the overwhelming majority of the planet didn't choose lounging on the couch watching TV over survivalist practice. > but getting a cabin out in the woods and trying to live off the land is totally a thing people do. And not a realistic option for the homeless unless you can afford land to live on. What kind of bizzaro country do you live in where this is remotely realis…
I'm not Swedish but I spent some time there. you can just go camping anywhere, just don't leave trash or mess it up. But the US has untold acres of unpatrolled national parks and private land that nobody is watching. Sure, legally, you can't just live there, but without anybody to enforce it, yeah you can.
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You might not, but nobody? There are those that do. There are even TV shows, multiple reality shows for watching people do just that. It’s not easy living for sure but getting a cabin out in the woods and trying to live off the land is totally a thing people do. For a real world example, you don’t go to the woods outside of Seattle because there are unhoused people living there and it's dangerous to go there.
You know what all of those shows have in common? The protagonist has thousands or tens of thousands to spend on setting up the basic infrastructure needed.