I just finished reading John Grisham’s “Street Lawyer”, and although it was published nearly 10 years ago, I found the statistics about homelessness fascinating even then. When we consider where the economy is, and where it is heading at the moment, the idea of not dealing with the issues of people living on the streets is just crazy. Here are a few paragraphs from the book:
“Do they arrest them?”
“Every day, and it’s stupid public policy. Take a guy living on the streets, in and out of shelters, working somewhere for minimum wage, trying his best to step up and become self-sufficient. Then he gets arrested for sleeping under a bridge. He doesn’t want to be sleeping under a bridge, but everybody’s got to sleep somewhere. He’s guilty because the city council, in its brilliance, has made it a crime to be homeless. He has to pay thirty bucks just to get out of jail, and another thirty for his fine…..Here’s the asinine part: It costs twenty-five percent MORE per day to keep a person in jail than to provide shelter, food, transportation, and counseling services…and that doesn’t include the cost of arrests and processing.”
Wow. And to think that you could start a conversation in many places where you would hear people agree that we should not be spending so much money on those poor, lazy street people. Those same people think that government should do less, and spend less, yet I would put money on the fact that those same people do not object to locking people up in jail. It keeps our society safer, and let’s face it, prettier when you think of the homeless. The police do sweeps...“They’ll target one area of the city, shovel up all the homeless, dump them somewer else. Atlanta did it before the Olympics–couldn’t have all those poor people begging and sleeping on park benches with the world watching….they don’t have any shelters. They simply moved them around, dumped them in other parts of the city lake manure.”
I realize that the US is not the only place that does that. China just did similar things to pretty-up Beijing before these past Olympics. But we need to address the issue here in our country, in our states, in our towns and cities. More and more people will become homeless through no fault of their own. They will lose the medical insurance they, and their families had, so will not be able to obtain some treatments for mental issues that they previously would have and their needs will be greater. To think that it is more popular with our society to jail people rather than help them is a perplexing concept. The following is from an ABC news story from 2007 about Santa Barbara, California (http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=2919916&page=1)
And now the city has a new class of resident, not quite homeless — but doesn’t have a home either. They are the working poor who live in their cars, trucks and campers. Call them the mobile homeless.
“We’ve lived in the homeless shelter, and it’s full of people that are drunk and on drugs,” said Carlos Cortez.
Working but too poor to afford rent in this expensive city, Cortez and his wife, Naomi, scraped together enough money to buy an old recreational vehicle they can live in.
It’s a phenomenon that is happening all over the country as people are priced out of local housing and have nowhere else to go where life might be better.
California alone has about 350,000 homeless people. Santa Barbara has 2,000, some still trying to make it in the working world.
“Some work in the service industries, some work in the local hotels and motels,” said Gary Linker, director of New Beginnings Counseling Center, which works with the homeless. “Some of them work for the city and county,” he said….
But even while the mobile homeless were wandering in search of a safe place to park, many of Santa Barbara’s downtown parking lots were empty all night, every night. That was until New Beginnings worked with the city to open the municipal parking lots.
Now the mobile homeless are allowed to come home from work in peace and park overnight under something called the Safe Parking Program.”
I guess the real core of the question is what our outlook on the homeless is. Are they crazy people who will always live on the edge, or maybe lazy people who just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get a job? Get a job? Yesterday, alone, over 40,000 layoffs from major companies were announced on the evening news. Homelessness is just a problem that we cannot ignore. We can either deal with it, or just try to make it go away by increasing the number of laws against it. Some cities have added laws to make it illegal to lay on a park bench after a certain hour, no blankets allowed, etc. While that might be good for the city, ignoring the idea of where those people go instead of the park is not good for anyone and it falls into the category of generalizing about who the homeless are. As with alcoholism, most of society thinks of the bums on skid row when they think of alcoholics, when most people with drinking problems wear suits and ties, or are at home raising children. Maybe thinking otherwise puts each and every one of us closer to the problems. Oh, but for the grace of God, go I.
