Opponents of eliminating encampments and cracking down on crime often claim that to do so is “criminalizing poverty.” The phrase is fairly recent; the earliest reference I can find is a year 2000 article out of the University of Pennsylvania entitled “The Criminalization of the Poor.” It argues that the poor who steal, far from being criminals, are victims of an unbalanced society. Here’s the key statement: “When you get right down to it, to be poor in America makes you a criminal. To drive your car without insurance, to steal food because your family is hungry, to take vacant houses so that your family is not out on the streets, to have your utilities turned on illegally so that there is heat in your home violates the nation's laws.”
This is essentially the argument the then-homeless Carroll Fife claimed when her group, Moms4Housing, squatted in that vacant house on Magnolia Street. As the publication SFist put it when they reported on Fife running for City Council, “Fife has made it clear she intends to shift the nature of property ownership in Oakland from one that generates revenue for landlords, to a model that builds social housing. She wants to establish a universal ‘right to housing’ in Oakland” by which seizing someone else’s property would no longer be illegal.
A Pew Center study from 2014 reported “[homeless] advocates say [anti-encampment] laws criminalize poverty and homelessness and usually stem from pressure from business interests or from homeowners taking a ‘not in my backyard’ stance.” A 2015 Harvard Law Review article held that fining people for things like failure to appear in Court, rolling through a red light or civil forfeiture of ill-gotten gains “severely amplif[ies] the burden that criminal punishment imposes on poor communities.” The authors of an influential 2016 publication by the Institute for Policy Studies, a self-described “progressive organization,” titled their study “The Poor Get Prison: The Alarming Spread of the Criminalization of Poverty.” Their conclusion was that “Many U.S. cities have criminalized life-sustaining activities, such as sleeping, sheltering, sitting, asking for help, sharing food, and even resting.” Cat Brooks, at the Anti Police-Terror Project, has demanded “Repealing laws that criminalize homelessness & poverty.” She even went so far as to accuse Mayor Libby Schaaf of “perpetuat[ing] violence against Black and Brown Oaklanders” because Schaaf “refuses” to repeal laws against crimes like squatting and, presumably, shoplifting.
And then, just last Friday, there was a letter to the editor in the San Francisco Chronicle from an ACLU official alleging that “Mayor London Breed’s plan to increase police presence in the Tenderloin threatens to criminalize poverty and people who are unhoused,” as if there’s nothing wrong with addicts shooting up on the sidewalks, sprawled unconscious in gutters, intimidating passersby (including children), and robbing convenience stores, or with gangbangers occasionally killing innocent bystanders and each other.
Look: It’s time to debunk such nonsense. Nobody is “criminalizing poverty.” It’s not against the law to be poor and no one is suggesting it is or should be. It’s not like the police are demanding to see everybody’s net worth and then are sending low-income people to internment camps for the poor.
What is being criminalized are illegal behaviors, such as camping in public spaces like parks, littering and dumping, open-air drug use, starting fires, stealing, non-payment of rent, not paying PG&E and other bills, driving without a valid license, and a host of other bad behaviors.
There are sound reasons for making such undesirable activities illegal. A bit of reflection will show any reasonable person that these behaviors interfere with the rights of the vast majority of citizens and threaten our health and well-being. It’s been this way for all of human history: There’s a reason the Ten Commandments, which are the basis of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths, expressly instruct “Thou shalt not steal” and “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s goods.” Every civilization in history has understood these truths but apparently Carroll Fife and Cat Brooks do not, which makes one wonder what their morality is based upon.
It is the task of our public safety officials to enforce the law; doing so is not criminalizing poverty, no more than arresting someone for auto theft violates that person’s right to steal someone else’s car if he so chooses. The reason the Democratic Party is in such dire political trouble in America is because the party allows, and indeed encourages, extremists to get away with incendiary, fake allegations that enforcing the law and protecting public safety are somehow equivalent to “criminalizing poverty.” Regular people know that this is ridiculous, and an insult to us law-abiding citizens. It’s time to call this “criminalization of poverty” shtick out for what it is: Bull.
Steve Heimoff