Regulation – Informed Comment https://www.juancole.com Thoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion Sun, 30 Jun 2024 05:00:52 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.10 SCOTUS to Homeless: Stay Awake or be Arrested https://www.juancole.com/2024/06/scotus-homeless-arrested.html Sun, 30 Jun 2024 04:02:33 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=219321 By Clare Pastore, University of Southern California | –

(The Conversation) – The Supreme Court has ruled that the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution does not prohibit cities from criminalizing sleeping outdoors.

City of Grants Pass v. Johnson began when a small city in Oregon with just one homeless shelter began enforcing a local anti-camping law against people sleeping in public using a blanket or any other rudimentary protection against the elements – even if they had nowhere else to go.

The court confronted this question: Is it unconstitutional to punish homeless people for doing in public things that are necessary to survive, such as sleeping, when there is no option to do these acts in private?

In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the court said no. It rejected the claim that criminalizing sleeping in public by those with nowhere to go violates the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. In my view, the decision – which I see as disappointing but not surprising – will not lead to any reduction in homelessness, and will certainly result in more litigation.

As a specialist in poverty law, civil rights and access to justice who has litigated many cases in this area, I know that homelessness in the U.S. is a function of poverty, not criminality, and that criminalizing people experiencing homelessness in no way helps solve the problem.


“Criminalization,” by Juan Cole, Digital, Dream/ Dreamworld v 3, PS Express, 2024..

The Grants Pass case

Grants Pass v. Johnson culminated years of struggle over how far cities can go to discourage homeless people from residing within their borders, and whether or when criminal sanctions for actions such as sleeping in public are permissible.

In a 2019 case, Martin v. City of Boise, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that the Eighth Amendment’s cruel and unusual punishment clause forbids criminalizing sleeping in public when a person has no private place to sleep. The decision was based on a 1962 Supreme Court case, Robinson v. California, which held that it is unconstitutional to criminalize being a drug addict. Robinson and a subsequent case, Powell v. Texas, have come to stand for distinguishing between status, which cannot constitutionally be punished, and conduct, which can.

In the Grants Pass ruling, the 9th Circuit went one step further than it had in the Boise case and held that the Constitution also banned criminalizing the act of public sleeping with rudimentary protection from the elements. The decision was contentious: Judges disagreed over whether the anti-camping ban regulated conduct or the status of being homeless, which inevitably leads to sleeping outside when there is no alternative.

Grants Pass urged the Supreme Court to abandon the Robinson precedent and its progeny as “moribund and misguided.” It argued that the Eighth Amendment forbids only certain cruel methods of punishment, which do not include fines and jail terms.

The homeless plaintiffs did not challenge reasonable regulation of the time and place of outdoor sleeping, the city’s ability to limit the size or location of homeless groups or encampments, or the legitimacy of punishing those who insist on remaining in public when shelter is available.

But they argued that broad anti-camping laws inflicted overly harsh punishments for “wholly innocent, universally unavoidable behavior” and that punishing people for “simply existing outside without access to shelter” would not reduce this activity.

In today’s decision, the court rejected the city’s invitation to overrule the 1962 Robinson decision and eliminate the prohibition on criminalizing status, but denied that being homeless is a status. Instead, the court agreed with the city that camping or sleeping in public are activities, not statuses, despite the plaintiffs’ evidence that for homeless people, there is no difference between criminalizing “being homeless” and criminalizing “sleeping in public.”

The decision is surprisingly thin on Eighth Amendment analysis. It declines to engage with plaintiffs’ arguments that criminalizing sleeping imposes disproportionate punishment or imposes punishment without a legitimate deterrent or rehabilitative goal.

Instead, the court returned over and over to the idea that the 9th Circuit’s decision required judges to make impermissible policy decisions about how to respond to homelessness. The court also extensively cited friend-of-the-court briefs from cities and others discussing the difficulties of addressing homelessness. Significantly, however, neither these briefs nor the court’s decision cite evidence that criminalization reduces homelessness in any way.

In a strong dissent beginning “Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, quoted extensively from the record in the case. The dissent included some shocking statements from the Grants Pass City Council, such as “Maybe [the homeless people] aren’t hungry enough or cold enough … to make a change in their behavior.”

Sotomayor noted that time, place and manner restrictions on sleeping in public are perfectly permissible under the Ninth Circuit’s analysis, and that the inevitable line-drawing problems upon which the majority dwells are a normal part of constitutional interpretation. She also observed that the majority’s contention that the Ninth Circuit’s rule is unworkable was belied by Oregon’s own actions: in 2021, the state legislature codified the Martin v. Boise ruling into law.

A national crisis

Homelessness is a massive problem in the U.S. The number of people without homes held steady during the COVID-19 pandemic largely because of eviction moratoriums and the temporary availability of expanded public benefits, but it has risen sharply since 2022.

Scholars and policymakers have spent many years analyzing the causes of homelessness. They include wage stagnation, shrinking public benefits, inadequate treatment for mental illness and addiction, and the politics of siting affordable housing. There is little disagreement, however, that the simple mismatch between the vast need for affordable housing and the limited supply is a central cause.

Crackdowns on the homeless

Increasing homelessness, especially its visible manifestations such as tent encampments, has frustrated city residents, businesses and policymakers across the U.S. and led to an increase in crackdowns against homeless people. Reports from the National Homelessness Law Center in 2019 and 2021 have tallied hundreds of laws restricting camping, sleeping, sitting, lying down, panhandling and loitering in public.

Under presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, the federal government has asserted that criminal sanctions are rarely useful. Instead it has emphasized alternatives, such as supportive services, specialty courts and coordinated systems of care, along with increased housing supply.

Some cities have had striking success with these measures. But not all communities are on board.

Pushing people out of town

I expect that this ruling will prompt some jurisdictions to continue or increase crackdowns on the homeless, despite the complete lack of evidence that such measures reduce homelessness. What such laws may well accomplish is to push the issue into other towns, as Grants Pass officials candidly admitted they sought to do.

The decision will likely put even more pressure on jurisdictions that choose not to criminalize homelessness, such as Los Angeles, whose mayor, Karen Bass, has condemned the ruling. While this ruling resolves the Eighth Amendment claims against sleeping bans, litigation over homeless policy is doubtless far from over.

This is an updated version of an article originally published April 17, 2024.The Conversation

Clare Pastore, Professor of the Practice of Law, University of Southern California

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The Return of GOP-backed Child Labor is another Good Reason to Tax the Rich https://www.juancole.com/2023/05/return-backed-another.html Tue, 30 May 2023 04:02:52 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=212299

A campaign to curb greed was key to the first fight against child labor. With GOP states putting young kids to work, we need that battle again.

( Otherwords) – Ever since the middle of the 20th century, our history textbooks have applauded the reform movement that put an end to the child-labor horrors that ran widespread throughout the early Industrial Age.

Now those horrors are reappearing.

The number of kids employed in direct violation of existing child labor laws, the Economic Policy Institute reported this year, has soared 283 percent since 2015 — and 37 percent in just the last year alone.

More recently there was the alarming news that three Kentucky-based McDonald’s franchising companies had kids as young as 10 working at 62 stores across Kentucky, Indiana, Maryland, and Ohio. Some children were working as late as 2 a.m.

Federal legislation to crack down on child labor has stalled out amid Republican opposition. And at the state level, lawmakers across the country are moving to weaken — or even eliminate — child labor limits.

One bill in Iowa introduced earlier this year would let kids as young as 14 labor in workplaces ranging from meat coolers to industrial laundries. And Arkansas just eliminated the requirement to “verify the age of children younger than 16 before they can take a job,” the Washington Post reported.

Over a century ago, in the initial push against child labor, no American did more to protect kids than the educator and philosopher Felix Adler. In 1887, Adler sounded the alarm on child labor before a packed house at Manhattan’s famed Chickering Hall.

The “evil of child labor,” Adler warned, “is growing to an alarming extent.” In New York City alone, some 9,000 children as young as eight were working in factories. Many of those kids, Alder said, “could not read or write” and didn’t even know “the state they lived in.”

By the end of 1904, as the founding chair of the National Child Labor Committee, Adler had broadened the battle against exploiting kids. He railed against the “new kind of slavery” that had some 60,000 children under 14 working in Southern textile mills up to 14 hours a day, up from “only 24,000” just five years earlier.

Adler put full responsibility for this exploitation on those he called America’s “money kings,” who he said were after “cheap labor.” Alongside his campaigns to limit child labor, Adler pushed lawmakers to end the incentives that drive employers to exploit kids.


Via Pixabay.

Aiming to prevent the ultra rich from grabbing all the wealth they could, Adler called for a tax rate of 100 percent on all income above the point “when a certain high and abundant sum has been reached, amply sufficient for all the comforts and true refinements of life.”

After the United States entered World War I, the national campaign for a 100-percent top income tax rate on America’s highest incomes had a remarkable impact. In 1918, Congress raised the nation’s top marginal income tax rate up to 77 percent, 10 times the top rate in place just five years earlier.

During World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt renewed Adler’s call for a 100-percent top tax rate on the nation’s super rich. By the war’s end, lawmakers had okayed a top rate — at 94 percent — nearly that high. By the Eisenhower years, that top rate had leveled off at 91 percent.

Felix Adler died in 1933, before he could see the full scope of his victory. But by the mid-20th century those inspired by him had won on both his key advocacy fronts. By the 1950s, America’s rich could no longer keep all they could grab, and masses of mere kids no longer had to labor so those rich could profit.

Via Otherwords

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Before RR Co. Norfolk Southern Poisoned Palestine, Oh., It Poisoned the Ohio Statehouse https://www.juancole.com/2023/03/southern-palestine-statehouse.html Tue, 07 Mar 2023 05:16:58 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=210525 The company plied state lawmakers with cash and lobbied against common sense rail safety measures.
 
( Otherwords.org – “The Wreck of the Old 97” is a classic bluegrass song recounting a spectacular train crash in 1903, caused by the company’s demand that the engineer speed down a dangerous track to deliver cargo on time.

Fully 120 years later we have the “Wreck of the Norfolk Southern” — a devastating crash caused by the company’s demand that it be allowed to run an ill-equipped, understaffed, largely unregulated, 1.7 mile train carrying flammable, cancer-causing toxins through communities, putting profit over people and public safety.

This rolling bomb of a train was hardly unique, for the handful of multibillion-dollar railroad giants that control the industry also control lawmakers and regulators who are supposed to protect the public from profiteers.

A measure of their arrogance came just two years ago, when an Ohio legislative committee dared to consider a modest proposal for just a bit more rail safety. Norfolk Southern executives squawked like Chicken Little, asserting a plutocratic doctrine of corporate supremacy on such decisions. They even imperiously proclaimed that state lawmakers have no right to interfere in safety matters.

Ohio’s Chamber of Commerce dutifully echoed Norfolk’s concern for profit over people, testifying that “Ohio’s business climate would be negatively impacted” by the bill. Never mind that Ohio’s public safety climate can literally be “negatively impacted” by train wrecks!

Plunging deeper down the autocratic rabbit hole, the Chamber insisted that corporate control over workers is sacrosanct. It postulated that a crew-safety provision in the Ohio bill was illegal because it “would interfere with the employment relationship between employers and their employees.”

Yes, that’s a corporate claim that executives have an inalienable right to endanger workers.

Sure enough, bowing to the corporate powers, Ohio lawmakers rejected the 2021 safety bill. And that is why, 120 years after the wreck of the old 97, train catastrophes keep happening.

 
 
 
Jim Hightower

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker.

Via Otherwords.org

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