A Theoretical and Legal Challenge To Homeless Criminalization as Public Policy
1994; Yale Law School; Volume: 12; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
0740-8048
Autores Tópico(s)Law, Rights, and Freedoms
ResumoYou are homeless. All day you have looked for a place to sleep indoors for the night. Your search is urgent, for tonight will be bitterly cold. As the sun sets, the temperature falls into the single digits. Unfortunately, your city has no homeless shelters. As doors close, you head toward your hideaway, an abandoned apartment house with a side door that is usually unlocked. You do not go there every night-another homeless person might discover your secret and beat you to it on some freezing or snowy night. Instead, you save it for emergencies. Tonight you can either take shelter there or risk freezing to death. You enter the cold, empty building, cover yourself with newspapers and cardboard, and go to bed. Although the abandoned building is not heated, at least you are not outside. The next morning you are awakened by a police officer, who promptly arrests you for trespassing. Your story is based on a true one. A few years ago, in Long Beach, New York, Benjamin Franklin Pierce was arrested the morning after he had spent the night in an abandoned apartment building. Pierce, a forty-four-year-old man, had been homeless for seven years and lived in a community that had no homeless shelters. He had sought shelter when the wind-chill-adjusted temperature dropped to twenty-four degrees below zero.1 Pierce's story is not unusual. Every year, police arrest men, women, and children who engage in activities necessary to preserve their lives.2 Increasingly, communities are using the criminal law to cleanse their streets of homeless survivors.3 These criminal law responses punish homeless offenders of certain
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