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If the Supreme Court rules on this, well, all I can say is it will be a really bad ruling that emboldens criminalization of the poor all across the US. (And it won’t be particularly effective.)
We tried this approach in San Francisco in the early 1990s under former mayor Frank Jordan, who was previously a police chief. He argued people should be sent to jail if they slept in the streets.
SF voters even passed a measure making panhandling illegal, with penalties of jail sentences or stiff fines.
Then there was the plan to take away people's carts.
This was ostensibly in exchange for a bed. But of course there were not enough beds.
(There are still not enough beds.)
So all the crackdown did was move people from Downtown into the Western part of the city and into Golden Gate Park.
And into the Western neighborhoods.
Homeless advocates sued, argued it violated people's civil liberties, due process and the right to equal protection under the law.
In the end, it ultimately wasn't popular. (Voters always rate homelessness as a top concern. But they never want to adequately support services -- especially in their backyard. Yet they don't want to see poverty. And so, they support de facto criminalization -- up to a point.)
It also wasn't particularly cost-effective (or actually effective at all) to jail people for short periods of time.
So Frank Jordan was voted out of office for Willie Brown after a single term.
And the city had to clear 40,000 citations and warrants, that were obviously never going to be paid by people who didn't have the means to pay for them.
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