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- cross-posted to:
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The Oregon case decided Friday is the most significant to come before the high court in decades on the issue and comes as a rising number of people in the U.S. are without a permanent place to live.
So, where are they supposed to sleep? In a jail cell?
Yep! That way they can be used for slave labor for the owner class.
At a far higher rate than actually employing them at the median income would be as well.
The only reason that companies want prison labor is because it is cheap for them since the taxpayers are subsidizing the labor costs.
Overall it would be cheaper for states to just pay the homeless the median income than to incarcerate them. A lower rate that could be described as a basic income that is implemented universally would go pretty far in both increasing the opportunities for the homeless to afford housing and reduce the chance of people from becoming homeless.
See, this is the most frustrating part of the American homeless crisis. Literally the cheapest solution is to just build free housing.
The cheapest solution is to just fix the problem, but instead we choose to do more expensive things that don’t do anything to address the issue, but may possibly make it temporarily someone else’s problem.
Incarcerating them is a benefit for multiple terrible reasons!
You don’t even have to build housing. The US has more vacant homes than it does homeless people.
It’s that high to employ all the guards and construction and wardens and whatnot. A lot of hands are in that cookie jar.
As well as to extract tax money from the working class. As it makes more economic sense to house and rehabilitate a person then it does to put them in jail. But the jail tends to have more kickbacks for the owner class.
Yes, and without what meager belongings they had prior to arrest. Any changes of clothes, tent, coats, bicycle, all gone.
I’m seeing people who are very likely homeless walking down busy highways and even the interstate to get to the town where I live, presumably to go to the jobs they still have despite being “lazy homeless people.” Walking down them miles out of town. They must have to walk for 2 or 3 hours minimum just to get to work. It would take them 2 hours to get to the nearest bus stop from where I often see them walking (near a woods where they must be camping).
A significant number of them are Latino, and this town does not have a large native Latino population, making me think they are migrants who ended up homeless after hoping to come to America for a better life.
I assume Republicans think all of that is just fine.
This is the ground work to start mass deportation during project 2025 when Trump wins.
In the case of CA, these people are going to be given in shelter beds. (I know, it sounds counterintuitive to the ruling.)
The main reason CA brought the case is because they aren’t allowed force portions of their unhoused populations indoors. They can’t move a segment of the population unless there is enough space for the entire population.
So, if a county had beds for half of the unhoused population, and it wanted to bring half of them indoors, it couldn’t. It could only make moves once it had beds for all.
I’m sure some place will be shitty and will just throw people in jail, but the big west cost cities have a lot of unfilled shelter beds that they would like to fill.
And all that being said, a lot of these unhoused people are avoiding shelters for a reason. Being on the street is actually preferable to what people experience in some shelters. So, as much as Newsom will tell you that he wants to be compassionate and give people a bed, he’s not telling you that bed is next to a psycho that’s going to scream all night then assault someone.