Homelessness: Should it be illegal?
Can municipalities make it a crime to sleep outdoors? That’s the question the Supreme Court debated this week in what could lead to its “most significant ruling” on homelessness in decades, said Ann E. Marimow and Reis Thebault in The Washington Post. The case centers on three ordinances in the town of Grants Pass, Ore., that ban camping or sleeping on public property and using blankets or cardboard for warmth. Punishments include a $295 fine, with additional fines and jail for nonpayment. Lawyers for homeless residents argued that since Grants Pass doesn’t offer adequate shelter space, the ordinances criminalize homelessness itself and thus violate the constitutional prohibition on “cruel and unusual” punishment. During oral arguments, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority expressed reluctance to “micromanage” local laws on the homeless, but acknowledged it might be unfair to punish people who have no choice but to sleep outdoors. Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked what homeless people should do when night comes: “Are they supposed to kill themselves, not sleeping?”
Actually, it’s “homeless-encampment culture” that’s cruel and unusual punishment, said Stephen Eide in National Review. In the U.S., about 300,000 people sleep outdoors every night, and on the West Coast in particular, many have set up massive tent cities that are hotbeds of drug-taking, untreated mental illness, and crime. The people sleeping in them are exposed to theft, assault, and disease. The Constitution “isn’t a suicide pact,” said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. Outdoor homeless camps are threats to public safety, and local officials have a right “to protect their citizens.”
It’s “no surprise that the justices struggled with the issue,” said Matt Ford in The New Republic. Even conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett seemed torn, noting that a ban on sleeping outdoors would only “shunt homeless people or the poor out of your jurisdiction and on to others.” Liberal Justice Elena Kagan argued that homelessness is “a status,” not an act that can be punished. “For a homeless person who has no place to go, sleeping in public is kind of like breathing in public,” Kagan said. No one expects the Supreme Court’s decision to solve the country’s homelessness crisis, said Mark Joseph Stern in Slate. But allowing cities and towns to ban sleeping outdoors “will do nothing to help people who lack housing”—or make them disappear.