America is Wrong About How We Are Addressing Homelessness
The source of media that I chose to examine was an episode from the podcast You’re Wrong About that is titled “Homelessness.” The You’re Wrong About podcast is a podcast by journalists that researches a topic, person, or event that is often mischaracterized by the media and/or the general public and debunks common misconceptions. In 2019, co-host Michael Hobbes traveled to Salt Lake City to understand how they “solved” homelessness as they had previously claimed in 2015. After interviewing the homeless and those who work with the homeless, he was able to detail how the criminalization of the poor and the lack of social support that they have access to exacerbates the issue of homelessness.
One of the people Hobbes interviewed was a woman who had once considered herself a high-functioning addict. Meaning that the was able to hold down a job, was going to college, and was not stealing. That was, however, until she became homeless and began living in her car. Shortly after she began living in her car, she discovered that she was pregnant.
Since this woman was addicted to heroin, she had to begin taking methadone since quitting could cause the baby to experience withdrawal symptoms which could be fatal. Around this time, she began living with her aunt and after she had her baby she stayed on methadone because she did not have resources to quit herself. In order to stay on methadone, she had to pay $85/week and had to be at the clinic before 8:30 AM every morning. She never received daycare vouchers due to an administrative error so after every shift of her waitressing job, she would go to her babysitter and give them all of her tips from the previous night so she could go to the clinic.
Meanwhile, she had applied for housing but was put on a waitlist. Eventually, she decides to go off the methadone by herself, reasoning that she will have more money and will have more control over her situation. In just a couple weeks, the stress gets to her and she begin using again and is kicked out of her aunt’s house. Within just three months, she went from being a new mother with a stable job to sleeping in her car in parking garages. During this period, the housing she applied for comes through, but she was unable to move in because she could not afford to pay the deposit. She eventually gets pulled over and when the officer finds heroin in the car she is sent to jail. Once she was in jail, she begged to be sent to court ordered treatment, but she gets told that she did not have enough heroin on her to mandate treatment. After over a year of being in and out of treatment and relapsing, she finally gets clean and regains custody of her son.
Hobbes touched on quite a few things that we discussed in class and read about in Edelman’s (2017) Not a Crime to be Poor. Specifically, “citywide bans have risen significantly on camping in public, begging in public, loitering, loafing, and vagrancy, sitting or lying down in particular public places, and sleeping in vehicles” (Edelman, 2017, p. 119). Hobbes also talked about how when someone who is homeless enters the criminal justice system, they just keep reentering the system because simply the way they live their life is criminalized and for things like being unable to afford their fines, not owning transportation to fulfill court ordered community service, or just being too mentally ill to understand what is going on.
Personally, what stood out to me was when Hobbes said that when the numbers are broken down, only a small percentage of funding actually goes to homeless shelters or other services. The majority of funding goes towards law enforcement and medical care. After listening to this podcast and reading the required readings it has become clear that homelessness is a burden that cities do not want to deal with. Instead of restructuring the system in way that is more effective and actually funding shelters and other forms of support, homelessness has been criminalized and those who are struggling are left to fall through the cracks. According to The United States Interagency Council on Homelessness (2012), “instead of helping people escape life on the streets, criminalization creates a costly revolving door that circulates individuals experiencing homelessness from the street to the criminal justice system and back, wasting resources that could otherwise go to solving the problem” (p. 1).
The woman that Hobbes interviewed was just one person of the millions that have failed by our government. Many would be quick to point out the mistakes that she made that caused her to end up in her situation, but the same argument could be made about all the times that the government failed to provide proper support for her. When she was struggling to stay afloat while waitressing, she thinks that if she had received a check for a few thousand dollars then she would not have spiraled out the way that she did. With that money, she could have paid the deposit for an apartment and had enough left over so that she was not living paycheck to paycheck. Instead, she went through the criminal justice system where state most likely spent thousands on her regardless due to the court and jail fees that she accumulated.
This podcast served as an important reminder that as it stands, the criminal justice system is structured in a way the punishes people for being homeless and that we do not have support services in place to properly combat the issue of homelessness. Being a fan of the podcast, I would recommend it to anyone, but I would especially recommend this episode to those who are studying criminology. It does a good job of highlighting the complexity of homelessness and how people just cannot “go get a job” to get them off the street.
– Aubrey Greenland
References:
Edelman, P. (2017). Not a Crime to Be Poor: The Criminalization of Poverty in America. The New Press.
National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. (2018, October). What is criminalization of homelessness? https://Nlchp.Org. https://nlchp.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/criminalization-one-pager.pdf