Street Spirit June 2004

The Deadly Consequences of Criminalization

A nationwide epidemic of hate crimes and murders of homeless people by Donald Whitehead

The National Coalition for the Homeless was founded in 1984 by a group of individuals who were not willing to continue letting people die on the streets of the richest country in the world.

Its founders banded together to pursue a national remedy for the most extreme poverty. They shared the perspective that homelessness is the tragic consequence of an unconscionable lack of societal will to ensure all people access to the basic resources necessary for survival. NCH sees homelessness as the ultimate societal injustice for which the redress must involve the restoration of basic equality of all people.

Unfortunately, even with all the hard work of the National Coalition for the Homeless and other groups, homelessness has continued to grow unabated. We currently have the highest number of people homeless in the history of the United States. We estimate about 3.5 million people are homeless. Last year, according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, homelessness grew by about 17 percent in this country. Incredibly, 30 percent of the people who requested shelter in this country were turned away for lack of space.

As the numbers of homeless people rise in this country, we also have seen the rise of criminalization. Cities generally have failed to address the root causes of poverty, homelessness and economic inequality. It is increasingly likely that, instead of addressing those issues, their solution is incarceration.

Local jurisdictions adopt ordinances that criminalize common activities such as sleeping, sitting on a sidewalk, standing or begging in public places; and people without homes frequently face arrest for public nuisance crimes.

The National Coalition has done studies for the last four years where that looked at 147 communities in this country. We found that, in 80 percent of those communities, homeless people were being criminalized for those ordinary, life-sustaining activities that they had no other choice but to do outside. And, incredibly, in 100 percent of those cities, there was not enough shelter space to adequately provide for the homeless people in their community.

Incarceration hides people with the most urgent needs from public view, and prison can become an alternative to housing and social services. Incarcerating homeless people exacerbates their situation. Once they leave the penal system they are still homeless, and they are now ineligible for housing or other federal resources.

The criminalization of homeless people has other consequences. We have noticed over the last four years a rise in hate crimes against homeless people. As a direct result of the villainization of homeless people, we have seen an increase in horrible acts of violence against people that are homeless in this country. Over the last five years, we have seen 280 incidents of violence against homeless people, and 131 of those incidents have resulted in death.

We think cities that criminalize homeless people have a direct link to people being victims of hate crimes. People are being forced to live away from cities because they have to fear arrest, and they're moving to more obscure locations; and when they move out to those locations, they become susceptible to these kinds of crimes.

We've also seen another phenomenon that we think is just an incredibly egregious practice that has materialized. Hate speech has become a common practice in this country. Hate speech includes the exploitation of homeless people in videos, literature, and the other media like radio and television. We just had a very successful campaign against one of these. There was a video being produced called Bumfights.

Bumfights actually sold almost a half-million copies around the world.

Bumfights was a video where homeless people were being paid to do things like set their hair on fire. They were being paid to fight. They were being paid to do stunts like riding shopping carts down stairs, running headfirst into restaurant counters, pulling their teeth out with pliers. The producers of these videos saw that as a form of entertainment.

We were outraged by this, and we resisted. At one point, we were interviewed in the media about this by MSNBC, CBS evening news and CBS morning news. We struggled with that particular course of action because we didn't want to promote that video any more, although we knew we had to do something about it. So we attacked it at the retail end. These Bumfights videos were being sold at Target, in Borders, in Best Buy, in Tower, in Blockbuster, in most of the major retailers in the country. We launched a campaign to stop that. We just got the letter from the last retailer, Blockbuster Video, and all of these videos have been pulled from the shelves.

The seriousness of this issue is that a lot of these hate crimes that we've seen over the last year have been copycat crimes that people saw in these various videos. The stun gun incident was something that was done on a video in Las Vegas. People are being set on fire, which was something that was done on a video, and kids have mimicked this. And it's really caused a lot of people to suffer very greatly across this country.

But we don't want to stop at just the Bumfights and the hate speech. We've done a few other things that we think are going to be very helpful in really bringing this issue to a close. We've talked with members of Congress and we've met with the entire Judiciary Committee; and we now have a letter being circulated in Congress asking for a GAO study looking into the incidence of hate crimes in this country. Rep. John Conyers from Michigan has circulated that letter in the House, and we also have another letter that is going to be circulated in the Senate by Sen. Rockefeller from West Virginia.

We've launched the Bringing America Home Act. It is a comprehensive set of initiatives to address the issue of homelessness. And it starts out with something that is fundamental to ending homelessness in this country - something that every other industrialized, First World country has a right to - and that's the right to housing in this country.

The first title of this bill is putting Congress on record as supporting the basic right to housing - something that most countries have done through the UN Declaration of Human Rights. So we're putting the United States Congress on record as supporting that idea.

We're also asking Congress to do something that it hasn't done in a very long time, and that's to produce housing.

Back in the early 1970s, under the Ford Administration, we produced 400,000 units of housing. This year we had a deficit of 250,000 units of Section 8 housing. For the first time in the history of this country, people are about to be evicted from Section 8 housing. We can't afford to let that continue. This bill asks for 1.5 million units of housing over the next 10 years, or 150,000 Section 8 housing units each year for the next 10 years. There are also economic security provisions in the bill.

It is a comprehensive piece of legislation and it really gets to the underlying, systemic issues that cause homelessness. For years, we have been putting a band-aid on this issue; we've only been treating the symptoms. It's time to really get to the issues that truly cause homelessness - and that's the lack of affordable housing and poverty. Substance abuse does not cause homelessness. Mental illness does not cause homelessness. What really causes homelessness in this country is that people do not have enough money and there are not enough affordable houses to go around. This bill really gets to those issues.

Our ultimate goal is to make homeless people and people that are living in poverty a protected class under civil rights legislation. Right now, we have 53 cosponsors for this legislation. It's the broadest piece of legislation to date to address this issue, and is a solution to the housing crisis in this country.

We see the criminalization of homelessness as the unfinished business of the civil rights movement, and we want to address it in the manner that the civil rights advocates and the civil rights pioneers did. In order to end criminalization, we have to demand that it end.

When we got angry about social ills in this country, we were able to make changes. When we got angry about the civil rights movement, when we got tired of seeing people being sprayed by hoses and tired of seeing people being attacked by dogs, we got angry and we did something about it.

We should be angry about people getting set on fire, and we should be angry about children being firebombed simply because they're homeless. We should be angry about people being drowned and beheaded. It's time to get angry about this issue and we have to do that if we're going to end this terrible injustice in the richest country in the world.

I'm angry about homelessness because it happened to me on the streets of Cincinnati. Several times I was rousted away by the policemen. I didn't wear a suit back in those days, and I didn't smell very well, and I didn't look very well; and because of that, I was invisible. Because of that, people were willing to come up to me on the streets, and say nasty things to me, and tell me to move along, and spray water on me when I slept on park benches at night.

I am very passionate about not letting that continue to happen to people in this country. I've experienced at first hand how you're made to feel invisible and how painful it is for people to act violently against you simply because you're homeless. We can't allow that to continue to happen in this country.

Support Bringing  America Home Act, House Resolution 2897. NCH has petitions on their website. To get involved, contact:

National Coalition for the Homeless
1012 14th Street, NW, Suite 600
Washington, D.C., 20005-3471
Phone: (202) 737-6444
E-mail: info@nationalhomeless.org
Web: http://www.nationalhomeless.org

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