We have the fifth highest prison population per capita (behind El Salvador, Rwanda, Turkmenistan and Cuba), and you want to consider adding potentially another 600,000 (40% more) people to that population?
That would put us at the highest prison population in the world, and it would be not even close. That would be twenty per cent higher than some of the world's most despotic, dysfunctional countries.
And the same people who are not willing to fund socioeconomic initiatives, not willing to fund access to mental healthcare, are also not willing to fund improvements to American prisons which, while not the worst in the world, are certainly not even close to the pack when it comes to humane conditions, improving situation and circumstance, and reducing recidivism.
How would such a person get to leave prison if they were there because they were homeless? They leave prison and they're still homeless (see: already vastly overwhelmed transitional support structures, and a huge influx of additional demand and suffocatingly small desire to improve that situation).
Sorry and thank you. I'll be more blunt: we should not criminalize homelessness, putting these people in jail for being poor or mentally ill or addicted beyond agency is inhumane, and maybe if we deal with this problem we'll be less afraid of dumping the millions of Americans wrongly jailed and withheld from career development by the state back into the world.
The quote came to mind while I listened to a Radiolab episode on police surveillance [1]. We usually take it to mean opposing tyranny, even when convenient. But that might be too simple.
For every Patrick Henry there are dozens who prefer not to die. If we let the security situation devolve out of sympathy, or inequality increase in pursuit of efficiency, those people will snap and prompt a brutal backlash.
I’m not suggesting we re-criminalise homelessness. But the status quo, with the permanent homeless population, isn’t working. I don’t know how much one quashes one’s sympathy for the less fortunate and sense for technological progress to achieve these ends, but it’s becoming clear we have to explore toward that boundary. Open-air hard drug use, theft of non-essential goods, aggression and refusal to receive psychiatric screening (note: not treatment); these seem like low-hanging fruit to target zero of. Hell, make it part of a grand bargain to improve the transient homeless population’s wellbeing.
[1] https://radiolab.org/podcast/eye-sky