Current State
Current State of Laws and Policies
The COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating housing instability across the United States, particularly for BIPOC communities. Unsheltered homelessness was already increasing prior to the pandemic as housing costs continued to rise and, in some cities, skyrocket.
As a result of structural racism and structural paternalism, BIPOC youth and young adults and those who identify as LGBTQ+ are disproportionately more likely to experience homelessness.
An increasing number of cities are criminalizing homelessness, making it illegal for individuals to perform simple and public activities that are unavoidable when people do not have a safe place to live or sleep indoors, in direct violation of international human rights law. (1) Criminalization encompasses all efforts to ban or penalize camping, overnight parking, sleeping in vehicles or RVs, loitering, and even panhandling.
Cycles of arrest and incarceration, perpetuated by local police and courts, only exacerbate the physical, emotional, and economic challenges people experiencing homelessness navigate daily.
Several cities and states have criminalized or attempted to criminalize homelessness, potentially first offering a shelter bed, but ultimately forcing individuals experiencing homelessness to choose between shelters and prison. These policies fail to recognize that shelters are an insufficient local response to homelessness, particularly during a viral pandemic, and the false choices of shelter and prison ignore individual needs and the limitations of shelters. Further, many communities don’t have designated shelter space for young people. Youth who choose or are forced to live outside instead of in shelter have often found that their privacy, safety, and dignity are not protected in shelter settings. Prison is an inhumane alternative.
Youth under the age of 18 who are fleeing violence and are often unable to access shelter because they cannot receive parental consent; local child welfare agencies are not equipped to offer support and some simply refuse to respond to requests from homeless service system partners.
Youth, particularly BIPOC youth, are vulnerable to being caught in the criminalization of poverty and often targeted by law enforcement for low level offenses that result in fees and fines.
These fees and fines can then result in debt and with no access to income and youth trapped in poverty over offenses that disproportionately target BIPOC communities. The burden of these fees and fines can lead to individuals losing jobs, homes, access to public benefits, custody of children, and the right to vote. Individuals who have immigrated may be subject to deportation in addition to all of the retribution outlined above.
Even as some low level offenses are eliminated from penal codes, people previously punished or penalized for those offenses are not paid reparations nor supported in recovering from the harm of incarceration and the cycles it perpetuates. (2)
Race, class, age, gender, citizenship status, sexual orientation, and physical and mental health status are all factors that create individual protective factors, privileges, disadvantages, and vulnerabilities. Intersectional structural oppression leaves many members of our communities vulnerable to arrest, incarceration, punishment, or institutionalization simply for performing activities necessary to their survival. Anti-Blackness is embedded in our societal norms and informal rules, just as it is embedded in local penal codes and federal policy, often serving as shortcuts to perpetuate structural racism.
Institutionalization, either through incarceration, mandatory treatment, or mandated shelter, is a form of controlling people experiencing homelessness. For youth and young adults, incarceration hinders adolescent development. (3)
In addition to laws that criminalize aspects of survival behaviors such as camping, resting, or panhandling, young people are also subject to “status offense” laws that criminalize acts specific to youth. Such status offenses, which include imposing curfews or criminalizing the act of “running away,” are societal overextensions of projected family roles, with paternalistic systems asserting that young people’s lives should be controlled and dictated, violating their rights to self-determination and dignity. The threat of these laws being enforced often discourages youth from seeking out governmental assistance, and instead pushes them into more vulnerable situations.
(1) “The United States is under obligations to protect the human right to adequate housing under numerous treaties and declarations... The U.S. has failed to uphold its obligations to protect the human right to adequate housing, under international law and its specifically accepted recommendations on the right to housing and protection of homeless persons from the 2015 Review.” National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty. (2019, October). Housing and Homelessness in the United States of America. http://nlchp.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Housing-Homelessness-US-UPR-2019.pdf
(2) A study recently showed that incarceration and imprisonment can have a criminogenic effect, which means it is likely to cause, rather than prevent, further crime. Vieraitis, Lynne & Kovandzic, Tomislav & Marvell, Thomas. (2007). The criminogenic effects of imprisonment: Evidence from state panel data, 1974–2002. Criminology & Public Policy.
(3) The Department of Justice’s Office of Juvenile and Justice and Delinquency Prevention sponsored a report by the National Research Council at the National Academies that found that our current juvenile justice system “routinely deprives youth of three conditions that are critically important to healthy adolescent development: active involvement by a parent figure, peer groups that value positive socialization and academic success, and activities that contribute to decision-making and critical-thinking abilities.” Reforming Juvenile Justice: A Developmental Approach