HOW NATIONAL LAW CENTER ON HOMELESSNESS & POVERTY ENDS CRIMINALIZING ... (2186 hits)
NOTE: AGNES B. LEVINE IS NOT, NOT AFFILIATED IN ANY WAY WITH HARRY WATLEY (He's up to new tricks as usual. Thank you!)!!!
Dear Friends,
Race and homelessness are deeply interrelated, but this connection is too little discussed. While this is a critical issue every month of the year, I’m highlighting it now during Black History Month to elevate this important issue.
African Americans make up 12% of the U.S. population. But they make up 26% of the poverty population, and a staggering 40% of the homeless population. Not only are African Americans more likely to be homeless, they remain homeless longer than their white peers.
The disparity is dramatic, and poverty alone does not explain it. One recent study indicates that housing segregation is a critical factor. In our report to the UN Committee on Racial Discrimination, the Law Center detailed the disparate racial impact of the crisis in affordable housing and the lack of legal protections for vulnerable tenants.
The criminal justice system surely plays a role as well, with the disproportionately higher incarceration rates of African Americans putting them at risk of homelessness upon release and making it even harder for them to find housing or employment.
At the front end of the criminal justice system, the criminalization of homelessness has long roots in racial discrimination. As Kim Hopper and Paul Boden have noted, vagrancy laws were enacted in the post-civil war South as part of an effort to restrict the movements of newly freed slaves.
As documented in our report, No Safe Place, their present day equivalents - such as sit-lie laws, anti-sleeping bans, and anti-panhandling laws - are now the tools that cities use to drive people they consider undesirable away or at least out of sight.
As Jeff Olivet notes, the national dialogue about race must include not only its connection to poverty but also to the most extreme manifestation, homelessness.
Fighting the criminalization of race, poverty and homelessness - and for greater equality - is one place to start.
