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Notes -
More SCOTUS sanity, this time on the 8^th Amendment in Grants Pass:
For background, the 9th Circuit has embarked on what the Court calls a 5 year experiment in decreeing that certain offenses are effectively criminalizations of status (which the 8th still does prohibit, much more narrowly now) because committing those offenses are "involuntary".
The decision is likewise pretty sweeping, it goes all the way back to Martin and clears the entire are of law flat.
HuffPost misrepresents the ruling:
This is completely wrong. The Court found that laws can target a wide variety of behaviors, and that the 8th Amendment prohibition on "cruel and unusual" is just on the punishment after conviction. Homelessness is still a status that can't be criminalized.
Sotomayor's dissent in the ruling is also lacking:
...or leave. This really cuts down to the roots of ideological disagreement between left and right: who are we ("we" meaning local government in this case) responsible for? Left says everyone, right says not everyone.
I agree with the SCOTUS majority that this is pretty weak 8th amendment claim but to get to the direct question:
leave to where?
what if your county is so big you can't walk out of it in one day and pass out on the road and thusly get busted for sleeping in public? what if everywhere in every direction has criminalized sleeping in public?
you eventually have no choice but to go to jail, yes?
I'm sympathetic to the idea that there's a class of people exploiting the law who prefer to be fulltime druggists living in a tents in the park despite homeless shelters having space for them, but am slightly horrified that you could end up in a situation where if you lose enough resources you have no choice but to stay awake until you sort your shit out or you go to jail.
The balance of needs here is that the police get the power to threaten to put you in jail unless you accept shelter, even if you don't want that particular shelter.
That requires the jurisdiction to provide shelter, which is usually unpopular (both since it costs money and since it has to go somewhere and no one wants to live next to the bum tank).
The Court noted that, as regards to the actual participants in the case, there were available shelters that they declined because they had rules the homeless would rather not follow.
In other words, there's some game theory here. The services & shelters work best[1] when they can impose rules. The shelters' ability to impose rules is limited by the alternative choice of the homeless to live on the streets. Solve for the equilibrium.
[1] As an aside, the shelters working best becomes a sort of fractal pareto of a pareto where the bottom 20% of the homeless themselves drag down the rest. It is very hard for people to become clean in an environment where there are drugs and alcohol.
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Some neighborhoods are already crapholes and you can just build there. Sometimes local leaders need a bribe. But it's not impossible to do.
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