Should Homelessness Be Criminalized Essay

The leading cause of domestic violence in the US is homelessness. Many people debate whether homelessness should be criminalized. Homelessness has always been a difficult topic for communities and governments to address. Homelessness is disruptive to the public, and creates tension in communities. Homelessness can have a negative effect on the public. Citizens can become angered at the homeless for sitting on the street and begging for cash, but in order to solve the problem there needs to be a proper solution rather than illegalizing homeless people to sleep on the street. Many homeless suffer from mental health problems that affect them on a daily basis. Mental illness while being homeless can be due to many different factors. Creating a

There are many reasons for this. One main reason is due to extreme costs in government funds that it would take to control homelessness through criminalization. Criminalization of homelessness creates free rein for law enforcement to provide consequences. This could result in more money spent on sending officers to deal with the homeless. This is an unnecessary and unneeded interaction with law enforcement that could be easily avoided. Dispatching law enforcement to clear out homeless that are possibly mentally ill living in large groups can be a very costly task. One instance of homeless people being difficult to control by law enforcement is shown in the article, Response to homelessness “untreated serious mental illness is one of the most distinguishing features of the challenge of modern homelessness. Though not a majority of the homeless population overall, the seriously mentally ill are more likely to be “service-resistant”—unwilling to accept help to get off the streets,” This explanation relates back to the topic of law enforcement. If there are police officers out on the streets trying to control

Criminalizing homelessness is criminalizing what for many is a life-sustaining behavior. It is extremely unethical to be forcing homeless off of the streets with nowhere to go or seek shelter at. Homeless depend on the public street to survive, it is a necessary aspect of their life if they aren't assisted by anyone else. In a credible article on the criminalization of homelessness it states that “a 2014 analysis of 187 American cities by the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, over half prohibited camping, sitting, or lying down in certain areas, and a third banned these activities citywide.” Many cities prohibit these actions without providing a secondary option such as issuing comfortable shelter beds as a subordinate to getting ticketed for seeking shelter on the busy bustling streets of a large city. Another personal example of the homeless being reliant on the streets. A certain individual homeless man by the name of Sarge has been ticketed over 75 times in his life while in Dallas Texas. These tickets have just been from living on the streets like everyone else that is left homeless. So what good is criminalizing and ticketing homelessness if it just digs a bigger deaper hole for the ones in