So here’s how laws criminalizing homelessness work and why they’re so fundamentally repulsive.
You’re homeless. Let’s say you just got evicted and you’re broke so you’re sleeping in your car.
A cop sees you being homeless in the wrong place. You get a ticket with a fine.
You can’t pay the fine, because you have no money, because you’re homeless.
The system sends out a notice for you to appear in court. Which you don’t get, because you have no mailing address, because you’re homeless.
When you don’t show up for court, a warrant is put out for your arrest. Along with a bigger fine.
You get arrested and thrown in jail.
The prison charges you $50 a night.
When you get out, you have to pay the prison fees. Which you can’t, because you’re homeless.
Meanwhile, cops keep writing you tickets for being homeless. Which you can’t pay, because you’re homeless.
And you keep getting arrested for not paying, and you keep going back to jail, for longer and longer periods, because now you have a criminal record.
And by this time you probably have PTSD from the torture and other forms of abuse which are routine in American prisons Franklin, which doesn’t help you at all.
And ultimately you go from “temporarily financially unstable” to permanently institutionalized in a for-profit prison. Your state government pays the prison $400 a night to house you, and a fraction of that is paid back to the politicians who passed the anti-homeless laws as campaign donations and legal “gratuities”, so everyone benefits except you and the taxpayers. And even if you had a legal route to fight back, the odds are you wouldn’t be physically or mentally capable of it at that point.
And once the Supreme Court makes forced labor in prisons legal again, those for profit prisons will rent your labor out for agricultural work, and you’ll be even more profitable working the fields for the rest of your short, ugly life.
And this is how the system is designed to work, because capitalism only works if people fear poverty enough to accept abusive working conditions, and the worse America becomes for the unhoused the more power capital gains over labor.
Welcome to capitalist America. Please leave your unalienable human rights at the door.
So here’s how laws criminalizing homelessness work and why they’re so fundamentally repulsive.
You’re homeless. Let’s say you just got evicted and you’re broke so you’re sleeping in your car.
A cop sees you being homeless in the wrong place. You get a ticket with a fine.
You can’t pay the fine, because you have no money, because you’re homeless.
The system sends out a notice for you to appear in court. Which you don’t get, because you have no mailing address, because you’re homeless.
When you don’t show up for court, a warrant is put out for your arrest. Along with a bigger fine.
You get arrested and thrown in jail.
The prison charges you $50 a night.
When you get out, you have to pay the prison fees. Which you can’t, because you’re homeless.
Meanwhile, cops keep writing you tickets for being homeless. Which you can’t pay, because you’re homeless.
And you keep getting arrested for not paying, and you keep going back to jail, for longer and longer periods, because now you have a criminal record.
And by this time you probably have PTSD from the torture and other forms of abuse which are routine in American prisons Franklin, which doesn’t help you at all.
And ultimately you go from “temporarily financially unstable” to permanently institutionalized in a for-profit prison. Your state government pays the prison $400 a night to house you, and a fraction of that is paid back to the politicians who passed the anti-homeless laws as campaign donations and legal “gratuities”, so everyone benefits except you and the taxpayers. And even if you had a legal route to fight back, the odds are you wouldn’t be physically or mentally capable of it at that point.
And once the Supreme Court makes forced labor in prisons legal again, those for profit prisons will rent your labor out for agricultural work, and you’ll be even more profitable working the fields for the rest of your short, ugly life.
And this is how the system is designed to work, because capitalism only works if people fear poverty enough to accept abusive working conditions, and the worse America becomes for the unhoused the more power capital gains over labor.
Welcome to capitalist America. Please leave your unalienable human rights at the door.