ACLU and the Homeless
Posted on April 16, 2006
Hat tip: AJ Strata and several other readers.
Los Angeles’ policy of arresting homeless people for sitting, lying or sleeping on public sidewalks as “an unavoidable consequence of being human and homeless without shelter” violates the constitutional prohibition against cruel and punishment, a federal appeals court ruled today.
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision, decided in favor of six homeless persons, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. The suit challenged the city’s practice of arresting persons for violating a municipal ordinance, which states that “no person shall sit, lie or sleep in or upon any street, sidewalk or public way.”
The appeals court ruled that the manner in which the city has enforced the ordinance has criminalized “the status of homelessness by making it a crime to be homeless,” and thereby violated the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
In the old days, when we were primitive, we mistakenly thought the ban against “cruel and unusual punishments” actually meant the government could not impose “cruel and unusual punishments.” Society, child-like in its simplicity, believed that the ban applied to things like: drawing and quartering; the Iron Maiden (before it was a rock group); the garotte; and burning at the stake.
Silly society! Language is much more complicated than that! Now we know, thanks to two very clever judges at the United States Court of Appeals, that for years society has misconstrued completely the phrase “cruel and unusual punishments.” What the phrase really means, the two learned judges explained in an opinion dated April 14, 2006, is “Cities can’t enforce anti-loitering laws.”
We’re lucky to have such sophisticated people explaining our laws to us. Plus, we’re lucky to have the ACLU file lawsuits so we’ll know what the laws really mean. They filed this lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles so those of us who live here would know that people are entitled to live on our sidewalks, no matter how much we hate it.
Don’t think that I am unsympathetic to fellow humans in need, but excuse me if I don’t see this as a solution. In my opinion, this only adds to the problem. It is this very sense of entitlement that creates the problems of poverty.
Many wonder how far such precedence will extend.
This strikes me as very mushy thinking. Following the court’s so-called logic, one could also say that a homeless, unemployed person who steals food is committing an “unavoidable act” while being “involuntarily unemployed,” and that a law against hungry people stealing is “criminalizing hunger.” After all, food is as necessary for survival as sleep, so stealing it might be “an unavoidable consequence of being human and homeless.”
This Op-Ed by Jan Perry illustrates my point very well.
But what good does that do? If we leave people on the streets and don’t create ways to bring them in for treatment, the problem will continue. Homeless people don’t need their right to die protected. They need help.
We do have ways of helping them. Creating a system of year-round, emergency homeless shelters, for instance, has provided many with an alternative to life on the street and has helped thousands into better living situations. Public investment of more than $12 million has created 4,000 units of permanent affordable housing for the homeless in downtown L.A., and more is coming on line.
I have worked with the ACLU in the past, and I have witnessed firsthand how the group’s determination and zeal on behalf of the civil rights of the homeless often outweigh its efforts to find real-world solutions to a tragic and growing problem.
Is it truly in the best interest of a person who suffers from mental illness and substance abuse to be given the pseudo-freedom to do harm to himself or to live among people who want to do harm to them?
The highest incidence of crime in skid row is transient-on-transient crime. Is it really in the best interest of the community to allow continued drug dealing and open-air narcotic use in a community where others have recovered and are living a more stable life? Don’t the people who work and live in skid row deserve the same benefits of a healthy and safe community that we all want?
Indeed, this is the question. Perhaps if the police could give the homeless a free ride to sleep on the sidewalk in front of some of these judge’s and ACLU lawyer’s houses, let them rummage their garbage for food, constantly beg them for booze money when they leave for work each morning, and deficate on their doorsteps, they might develop a different view.
Look, I don’t doubt that these are good intentioned efforts by true bleeding heart liberals to make a difference to our those they feel are less fortunate. However, the efforts are greatly misguided and offer absolutely nothing to solving the problem of homelessness.
It is easy for liberals to paint conservatives as unsympathetic toward the plight of the poor and homeless, but it simply isn’t true. Most conservatives have no objection to lending a helping hand to those in need. Don’t doubt that conservatives are among some of the biggest contributors to worthy charities. The truth is that not only are liberal policies not addressing the heart of the problem, it is liberal activism that has caused the problem to grow.
The argument that homelessness is due to economic factors is without empirical support. Almost every study of the homeless has concluded that behavioral problems drive their condition. Most of those who are homeless come from dysfunctional families and suffer from untreated mental illness, alcoholism, or drug abuse. Giving them money, or a home, may temporarily extend their lifestyle, but it will do absolutely nothing to prevent a recurrence of what actually afflicts them.
The ACLU have a historical hand in the problem. They are not completely wrong in pointing the finger at the government for the problem, however they are conflicting and hypocritical having contributed to it.
The right to shelter was first won in New York; the 1979 Callahan v. Carey consent decree, and the subsequent ruling in McLain V. Koch, gave the city no other choice. But those rulings didn’t settle the issue. Two years after Callahan was settled, the state legislature in Albany dealt directly with this question by seeking to amend the Adult Protective Services Act, a social services law. Specifically, it sought to allow a social worker aor anyone working for the city to take someone who is endangering hemself off the street and place him in an institution or hospital for 72 hours. The bill got nowhere because of the opposition from the ACLU. Then a woman died in a cardboard box and the bill was quickly passed.
Philadelphia was among the first cities in the nation to address the seriousness of the issue. At the start of the winter of 1985, Mayor Wilson Goode authorized the police to remove the homeless from the street whenever the temperature fell below freezing. Many of these persons, of course, did not possess the faculty of mind necessary to make informed consent. But that didn’t stop the local ACLU from carping. Jane Edenbaum and Barry Steinhardt accused Mayor Goode of “cutting constitutional corners,” maintaining that it was flatly wrong to assume that anyone who refused shelter was “mentally ill and incompetent.” But if cats and dogs know enough to get off the streets in freezing weather, why isn’t it reasonable for Mayor Goode to conclude that humans who balk are probably incompetent? After all, the Animal Rescue League and similar organizations rescue homeless animals. Why shouldn’t government rescue homeless men and women? Source
In essence, the ACLU are fighting for people, many who do not have the mental stability to make a reasonable decision, the “right to freeze to death.”
If there is an answer to the plight of the homeless, especially the vast majority that are mentally ill, it will take a change in policy along the lines suggested by Chrles Krauthammer.
“The standard for the involuntary commitment of the homeless mentally ill is wrong. It should not be dangerousness but helplessness.” But what prevents us from doing this, he notes, “is the misguided and pernicious civil libertarian impule that holds liberty too sacred to be overridden for anything other than the preservation of life. For the severely mentally ill, however, liberty is not just an empty word but a cruel hoax. Free to do what? To defecate in one’s pants? To wander around Grand Central Station begging for susteneace? To freeze to deat in Central Park?”
The ACLU remains steadfast in its belief, however, that it is the real champion of the homeless, and of the omeless mentally ill in particlular. It is convinced that the problem is a matter of money; if the government would only build more housing, the problem would go away. What this position neglects is not just the behavioral problems of the homeless; it sorely understmates the extent to which good housing, provided at public expense, becomes a magnet for the less-than-truly homeless or dipossessed. In the 1980s, Thomas J. Main, one of the early students of the homeless in New York, provided a congent case outlining why better housing might abet an increase in demand, thus engendering not only fraudulent applications but a state of depencency as well.Source
What it comes down to is helping those that can help themselves to do so, and helping those that can not help themselves to be taken care of. The ACLU’s misguided efforts blurs these lines. There is something incredibly inconsistent about the ACLU’s approach to mental illness, and the homeless. The ACLU are quick to to use insanity as a defense when it comes to felons and serial killers, but when it comes to those that refuse help from freezing to death in sub-zero weather, defecate on the streets, we should treat them as rational people capable of making their own decisions whether they endanger themselves or not.
Dr. Lurence Schiff, a psychiatrist who spent several years working with the homeless, agrees: “The real solution to the homeless problem lies in a return to ‘middle-class values,’ and indeed to the promotion of them in the lower class.”
ACLU attorneys, safely ensconced in their law offices, are never to be heard demanding accountability from the homeless. Nor are they inclined to insist on the impotation of middle-class values. Theri view of liberty doesn’t quite reach that far. But as W. Robert Curtis has put it, “The tragedy of deinstituionalism stems not from the idea of liberty itself but from its extreme application to all disabled individuals irrespective of their disability.”
Faek Jean Isaac and Virgina C. Armat, after having written a splendid book on the homeless, ended their work with an indictment of the ACLU: “Groups like the ACLU become self-righteous spokesmen for the very people they have ‘liberated’ to the shame of the streets. The real torment of their victims is buried under the cant of ‘homelessness’ with its hypocritical indictment of the political system for mistreating the poor.” The ACLU no doubt disagrees, but it is remarkable nonetheless how many experts on the homeless have come to the same conclusion as Isaac and Armat. And that is an idictment not easily shaken, not even by the ACLU.Source
There are many factors that contribute to the problem of poverty and homelessness, and I do not proclaim to have the solution. I would assume, however, that the direction most promising is one closer to what we were doing before liberal policies increased the problem. A direction that encourages responsibility, discourages dependency, and promotes compassion for those that do not have the mental stability to make reasonable decisions for their own welfare. The ACLU’s position, and the 9th Circus Court’s ruling does not help the homeless, and is not in the best interest of all citizens. Twisting the 8th amendment to conclude that arresting people for violating loitering laws is somehow “cruel and unusal punishment” should be an insult to the people of California. We should be striving away from the philosphy of “entitlement” towards one of responsibility and compassion.
For a satire take on this see Point Five
Trackback URL
Comments
8 Responses to “ACLU and the Homeless”
-
Affiliations
The Giants
-
Donate
Steal Me
Our Store
Click the design to visit our store and help Stop the ACLU!
More blogs about the ACLU
If they have the “right” to sleep on teh sidewalk, then I have the “right” to hose my sidewalk down when I feel the need.
Excellent post!…sure endanger all the citizens who pay taxes and try to uphold the law by pretending to be “humane” to a few…humane to let someone LIVE on the streets?..since when?!
Wait a second. The last I knew bedding down in a jail cell was healthier for you than bedding down on the sidewalk. So the Ninth Federal Circuit Court decided it is cruel and unusual punishment to treat a person humanely. Maybe the court believes they should be nice and give the homeless spike beds to sleep upon. The judges are obviously out of touch with reality.
“Creating a system of year-round, emergency homeless shelters, for instance, has provided many with an alternative to life on the street and has helped thousands into better living situations.”
Yep. And very likely drawn many who abuse that system. I’ve seen it up close. There are more than a few who bum their way from one shelter to another who are quite capable of working and living off the streets but who simply choose the lifestyle of sponging off others.
I’d submit that the population of “helpless” homeless is vanishingly small, and can be determined by simply requiring those who want shelter to work for it. Those who really cannot will be readily apparent. As will those who simply will not. Those who are willing to work for shelter and food deserve shelter and food, and often be aided in finding work (but will NOT be so aided by most “homeless shelters”) that will move them out of the homeless category. Those who cannot work for shelter and food do too, for different reasons. Those who will not work for shelter and food should be left in the cold hard reality they create for themselves. Or sent to a chain gang, the bums.
I’d further submit that most “homeless” programs are full employment programs for the crippling, truly harmful efforts of do-gooders to maintain a population of homeless.
Visit a few homeless shelters. Voluteer for one. See if the place is intent on really helping people or just perpetuating the class it serves.
The majority of homeless people are mentally ill and should be committed to treatement. The ACLU fight this. Addressing the heart of the matter is not giving them handouts, I hope that isn’t what you concluded I was suggesting…it also isn’t letting mentally ill folks freeze to death. These folks need mental help.
In the city where I went to college, there was a considerable homeless population, and I must say most of them were better behaved than my fellow students. Seriously, I saw far more students urinating on street corners than homeless people. But I do agree with Jay in that most homeless people do suffer from some sort of mental illness or chemical dependency, and they certainly do need help. Are you showing your inner liberal by suggesting that we provide free health care for them, Jay? If you are, I’m proud of you.
I’m not suggesting anything…I don’t have the answers, but I certainly don’t think we should be compassionless.
Update on the above story, thanks to John Jay Ray’s PC Watch blog. I found this story there
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_skid_row.html
Now the ACLU is trying to stop a policing program that has been effective, and actually helped the homeless the most, to say nothing of all the residents. The ACLU is with the hard-core criminals in this case.