Can go right next to the trophy for highest incarceration rates.
Surprising; I thought they had an effective for-profit prison-industrial complex
/s
Don’t worry the states are working on that as fast as they can. They’re making it a civil fine to “camp” in the wrong spot. Then you also get relocated to a shelter that has a limit on what you can bring in, including a ban on animals. If you resist at any point you end up in prison. So you have to just take losing your only companion and half of your belongings in stride. Also though, if you go to prison you lose all of your stuff. So they release you thirty days later (in the blue states) and your penniless, your dog has hopefully been adopted by someone else, and you have no clothes to survive extreme weather or any other property you need to function. So you can either die in the middle of the night to cold weather or take up that drug dealer on his offer of employment. Which ends up with a larger prison sentence down the road.
The fact that people don’t see this cycle is infuriating to me. All they see is a sidewalk that doesn’t have tents anymore and they cheer. They don’t care that they’ve permanently destroyed the lives of everyone who lived there.
There’s plenty of shelter space but you can’t do drugs there so people don’t go. But hey I guess you can use as much as you want in prison!
You have no idea what you’re talking about.
I’ve been homeless, and staying the fuck away from the shelters is how you stay safe.
I spent one night in one once, and promptly went back to looking for hidden little spots where no one would be able to see me.
Unless you are the crustiest of old homebums, shelters are where your shit gets stolen and you get stabbed if you make a fuss. Or raped.
No there isn’t actually. The recent SCOTUS case was literally repealing a past ruling that you couldn’t do what I described above, until there was enough shelter space for all the homeless in your city/county/state.
So that’s why enforcement suddenly got juiced. They no longer need a bed available to fuck your shit up.
It’s pretty cool how the richest nation in the history of the world can’t take care of people. /s
If every church in America housed 2.5 unhoused people the crisis would be solved overnight.
Who am i kidding though, American churches don’t exist to help people they exist to tax tithe people
When I feed the poor, I’m called a Saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, I’m called a communist.
The quote is by a priest from South America. I think about that alot when I think about church.
To be fair, a lot of small community churches or other religious shelters seem to do a lot more than anyone else about the problem.
Debatable.
I work for a church. We do a LOT for the community. Free lunches under the bridge. Park clean ups every season. After school programs for kids.
But in no way are we even close to doing as much good as actual organized programs that have real leadership and get funding.
Definitely a gross under count of the amount of homeless people. I’d imagine due to the government only counting occupied beds in shelters, the homeless they can physically count on one day, and not the number of incarcerated homeless. The amount is three times higher!
That’s not really how it works, the census bureau is extremely thorough - they send people into encampments regularly, work with homeless charities of all kinds, etc. These counts are estimates unless it’s a federal census year (when they absolutely do count every individual person that they possibly can), but they’re not going to be wildly inaccurate.
The much bigger issue is that these numbers appear to be limited to city limits or greater city area, and that’s where the discrepancy is gonna show up. Most homeless people dont live in cities, and camps are often established on conveniently unincorporated land so they dont have to be counted. Bureaucratic bastardry at its finest.