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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   28493 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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I agree with the SCOTUS majority that this is pretty weak 8th amendment claim but to get to the direct question:

...or leave

leave to where?

what if your county is so big you can't walk out of it in one day and pass out on the road and thusly get busted for sleeping in public? what if everywhere in every direction has criminalized sleeping in public?

you eventually have no choice but to go to jail, yes?

I'm sympathetic to the idea that there's a class of people exploiting the law who prefer to be fulltime druggists living in a tents in the park despite homeless shelters having space for them, but am slightly horrified that you could end up in a situation where if you lose enough resources you have no choice but to stay awake until you sort your shit out or you go to jail.

what if your county is so big you can't walk out of it in one day and pass out on the road and thusly get busted for sleeping in public? what if everywhere in every direction has criminalized sleeping in public?

In that case you might have a defense of necessity or even impossibility. In practical terms, they could simply offer you a bus ticket to a place with shelters or legal camping, and my understanding is that this is common practice already.

I'm sympathetic to the idea that there's a class of people who prefer to be fulltime druggists living in a tent in the park despite homeless shelters having space, but am slightly horrified that you could end up in a situation where if you lose enough resources you have no choice but to stay awake until you sort your shit out or you go to jail.

The balance of needs here is that the police get the power to threaten to put you in jail unless you accept shelter, even if you don't want that particular shelter.

That requires the jurisdiction to provide shelter, which is usually unpopular (both since it costs money and since it has to go somewhere and no one wants to live next to the bum tank).

The Court noted that, as regards to the actual participants in the case, there were available shelters that they declined because they had rules the homeless would rather not follow.

In other words, there's some game theory here. The services & shelters work best[1] when they can impose rules. The shelters' ability to impose rules is limited by the alternative choice of the homeless to live on the streets. Solve for the equilibrium.

[1] As an aside, the shelters working best becomes a sort of fractal pareto of a pareto where the bottom 20% of the homeless themselves drag down the rest. It is very hard for people to become clean in an environment where there are drugs and alcohol.

Some neighborhoods are already crapholes and you can just build there. Sometimes local leaders need a bribe. But it's not impossible to do.

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