US Supreme Court to rule on criminalisation of homelessness

By Marie Duhamel

Can the homeless be punished with fines or imprisonment for being forced to sleep on the streets?

In the small rural town of Grants Pass, Oregon, such measures were implemented, but a collective, including homeless individuals, challenged these ordinances in court.

The case, Grants Pass v. G. Johnson, is now before the Supreme Court, which is expected to issue its ruling within hours, just before its summer recess.

In an advisory opinion submitted to the nine justices in April, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops condemned the criminalization of homelessness, arguing that these ordinances violate the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits the imposition of excessive bail, fines, or cruel and unusual punishment.

Church organizations serving the poor are anxiously awaiting the Supreme Court’s decision. They fear that if the court upholds the ordinances, it would hinder their ability to help homeless individuals break the cycle of poverty, trapping them even further.

One of those who shares these fears is John Berry, national president of the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul. Established in the U.S. since 1845, the organization now has around 90,000 members.

How does the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul view the legislation adopted at Grants Pass?

We don't take a specific stance on issues of legislation, but the fact that this issue has become a subject of legislation and that it has gone all the way up to the Supreme court here in the United States is an indication that in our country, we have failed to adequately address the issue of homelessness and how to serve the poor.

No law passed by a city is going to end the problem of homelessness. What needs to be done to end homelessness is prevention efforts, short term financial aid. Supportive services are incredibly effective at helping individuals and families remain in their homes.

Notre Dame University here in the United States, a Catholic University, found that people who receive an average of two thousand dollars in emergency financial assistance were eighty one percent less likely to become homeless within six months of receiving this aid, and seventy three percent less likely to become homeless in twelve months.

So legislation by cities to criminal homelessness is not the solution. It's not going to do anything. The Church should be taking a stand against these laws and helping to continue to work with the poor because we're called to do that by the gospel.

The Gospel is filled with expectations to care for the poor. Christ himself told us whatever you do for the least of these you do for me. So the Church, through organizations like the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, must continue to do what it can across the United States and across the globe.

You know, as Catholics, we can disagree about policy proposals and how to address poverty, but it's hard to disagree with the fact that we know homelessness prevention works. And it's far more effective and successful over the long term to address homelessness prevention at the front, than waiting until somebody becomes homeless and then trying to re house them to address the problem.

If the Grants Pass law were to be maintained by the order of the Supreme Court, what kind of consequences do you fear it would have?

Criminalising homelessness in a city, if the Supreme Court were to uphold Grants Pass, is going to force them to relocate, which is going to bring additional challenges to serving the homelessness community.

It's going to cause organizations such as Saint Vincent de Paul, the Church, Catholic Charities, Catholic Relief Services, much more of a burden. Our model of service to encounter the poor through our one on one visits with the people that we serve, will be much more challenging.

We'll see an increase in homeless encampments in cities that do not enact these laws and the relocation of the homeless away from cities where these laws are enacted is going to disrupt the ability to provide services that they need. It's gonna be a a very bad thing.

When you say they will have to relocate, obviously, it implies that they break their social networks, the social support that they have, But do you fear that some of them will completely disappear?

My thought is there will be a large segment that will disappear into encampments in in the woods or into just places where, you know, they'll just they're just disappear into the unwanted population.

It's a very tragic thing.There's a number of the population of the homeless that are facing mental health issues and need supportive services. There may be addiction issues that they're trying to overcome and they need to be able to access the kind of supportive services that we provide at St Vincent de Paul and other agencies provide.

And were they to, you know, go into a place where they disappear and are not able to access our services, that's just going to create a cycle of poverty that they're not going to have an opportunity to have somebody help them to break. So it's a tragic situation for people that are going to end up in a situation like that.

How can individuals recover and leave the streets, when we know that the first thing flat owners will do before they rent their property is to check the backgrounds of who's asking? If a homeless person had fines and went to jail, they will never be able to rent that flat. So is the criminalisation of homelessness a way to stop homeless people from ever recovering?

That's an excellent point because that's a challenge that's now faced by many people who are in poverty situations, in homelessness situations, that are trying to establish a residence, whether it be an apartment or a house where they need to have a credit check, they need to have a background check.

Even if they're not homeless. We have a number of people that we are working with, single mothers especially, people who are living in what we call in the United States extended stay motels, where they're paying exorbitant rates to live one room – motel rooms, hotel rooms – with a number of children.

And the reason is they may be working, they may have an income, but because of prior credit issues or maybe arrest issues for minor offenses, marijuana, or maybe shoplifting or maybe something like that, they are having a very difficult time finding a landlord who will rent them an apartment or rent them a home.

So we as the Society of St Vincent de Paul are working with these individuals and with landlords to try and provide some guarantees and some opportunities for them to be able to get into homes, where we tell the landlords that we'll provide financial guarantees so that they'll rent to them.

So you make a very good point in that, if this Grant Pass pass law were to be upheld, and people who are homeless were to be arrested, and were to have an arrest on their record, to try to work with them to get them back into a home at a later point in time would become more challenging, because they would now have this arrest on their record that would have to be explained in overcome in order to get them, house.

So yeah, it makes it even more challenging - it's another impediment that gets put in their way of of getting them stable and self sufficient.

If the laws are maintained by the Supreme Court, do you think that we could see it as well as an encouragement for other towns, that the ones that are not currently taking those kind of measures, to do so, and to sweep away also their responsibilities towards the poor ?

Well, our hope is that, whatever the outcome, policymakers makers will use this as an an opportunity not to punish the homeless population, but to implement prevention efforts that keep them from becoming homeless in the first place.

So we have to address the financial burdens of people on the cusp of homelessness face. I think that what will happen is that, since, within a state, there may be a number of different towns that would take different approaches to this, were the Supreme Court to uphold it, that there may be an intervention at the state level or hopefully at the federal level where policymakers could come together and maybe come to some solutions that can address this on a larger basis, because it can't be a situation where one town and x these homelessness laws in another town doesn't because then you just end up in a very, very bad situation.

Is poverty, a topic or an issue that has been addressed by politics, especially before the presidential election in November?

Unfortunately, poverty is not a subject that has been discussed enough in the elections for a number of years. The subject of poverty, the subject of homelessness has not been addressed adequately at any level in elections for a long time, and it needs to be. It needs to be debated. It needs to be discussed.

The poor have to be treated as a problem that doesn't need to be fixed, but a problem that has to be addressed as an overall solution that includes all aspects of the private sector, the public sector, the faith-based sector, the economic models that exist, so that we can treat people as people and not just as things that need to be moved from one place to another.

So I would hope that at some point, the government at all levels will start to understand that they can't just ignore this problem and it has to be addressed. It's a growing problem.

The economic disparities between the rich and poor are only growing.

Can homeless people in the US vote?

While, it depends: in order to vote in the United States, you have to have an established identity, so your identity cards, some form of identification, a driver's license, federal government identity card, a passport, something like that. In order to get one of those, you have to have a residence.

So someone who's homeless living on the street would not have an identity card like that. So no, they wouldn't be able to vote. So they're disenfranchised as a result of their homelessness, which makes them even more voiceless. So it's a tragic situation, for them. They don't have a voice in their own future,

Do we know how many homeless people are helped every day and how many still should be helped?

I don't know if we have a specific number, but I can tell you that there are many more people seeking help than there are agencies that are available to help them.

We, as the Society of St Vincent de Paul, can only respond to a fraction of the requests that we get at this point in time. And I know Catholic Charities is the same way. And I know the Salvation Army and some of the others are the same way.

We get many, many more calls for assistance than we can provide for. And we are making constant efforts every day to seek additional funding, to seek additional partnerships for food, and household goods and clothing, so that we can increase our level of service. But we also - as much money and food and clothing as we can get - we also need people.

We need people to be able to work with with the people we serve, because as a Catholic organization, and as a an organization whose mission is to grow in holiness and spirituality through our service to the poor, we are very focused on the encounter that we have with the people we serve, that Christ-centered human-to-human encounter that we have with the people we serve.

We're not just a social service agency that hands out aid, we ensure that it's a human-to-human interaction with Christ in the center, that we respect the humanity of everybody we help. And that requires that, you know, our service to people is done person to person. So that's a very intense and and very important aspect of the work that we do.

So we need more Vincentians, we need more people coming into the society, we need more young people. So that's also something we're desperately working on, growing our membership.

We have almost ninety thousand members of the society of Saint Vincent de Paul in the United States. But we could use twice that number of people to be able to serve all the people who come to us. So it's an ongoing effort on our part to try and bring human and financial and material resources to serve all the people that need to be served,