Homelessness and Crime in California
The City Journal has a special issue titled Can California Be Golden Again? The issue describes, as Michael Shellenberger puts it, how “ruinous policies have transformed California from a symbol of progress to a cautionary tale for the nation.” Stephen Eide has an article titled The Encampment State on homelessness, a problem that is now far worse in California than in earlier times, bad as those were, and far worse than it is at present in other regions of the country with better functioning governments.
The whole article is well worth reading. Here is the passage on homelessness and law enforcement:
Finally, the criminal-justice system’s role in homelessness policy needs to be reaffirmed. Questions about law enforcement and homelessness tend to focus narrowly on camping regulations, but a larger context exists. Over the past ten to 15 years, California has pursued an increasingly progressive agenda on criminal justice. Examples include the passage of Prop. 47 in 2014 and the ongoing push to close Men’s Central Jail in Los Angeles, which would slash capacity in that county’s jail system by about 25 percent. It cannot be a coincidence that California’s criminal-justice-reform era has coincided with, per popular impression, the worsening of the homelessness crisis. More enforcement of all laws would help site new housing programs. A commitment to expanded, targeted enforcement around a new shelter or supportive housing facility would neutralize neighborhood concerns about disorder far more effectively than simply admonishing people to trust in social and health systems long notorious for their failures. Shutting down open-air drug markets in homelessness hot spots like the Tenderloin would improve conditions and may well make it easier to coax some tent-dwellers to accept services. This would require directing police to get more involved in social problems than many California Democrats now consider appropriate. But social work and police work should not be viewed as mutually exclusive.
Reducing jail capacity is 180 degrees backwards. We need more, not less. Before Proposition 47, the California Legislature moved to solve its prison overcrowding problem by dumping it on the counties, moving the lower tier of felons from state prison to county jail. With felons taking space meant for misdemeanants, it became much more difficult to impose meaningful consequences for misdemeanors.
Homelessness is to a large extent the consequence of people living a drug-consuming lifestyle, supporting their habits via theft. Drug use may be voluntary or the product of addiction, but either way this pattern of behavior needs to be broken. Punishment for crime is an important tool in the toolbox. It can be an important motivator to get addicted users to enter and remain in treatment. For those who voluntarily choose a parasitic lifestyle, it can provide the incentive to make a different choice.
As Eide notes, enforcement and assistance are not an either/or choice. Both have their place in a coherent solution. What we have learned from experience, and what people of sense knew from the beginning, is that throwing government money at the problem and enabling dysfunctional lifestyles are not solutions.
SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FEED
While this post has many unsupportable claims, two stand out.
First “It cannot be a coincidence that California’s criminal-justice-reform era has coincided with, per popular impression, the worsening of the homelessness crisis.” Only if you skipped logic in college and missed Post hoc ergo propter hoc.
Second, “Drug use may be voluntary or the product of addiction, but either way this pattern of behavior needs to be broken. Punishment for crime is an important tool in the toolbox.” Nixon pulled that tool out in 1972 when he declared war on drugs. That year there were 6,622 overdose deaths. in 2020 there were over 91,000. Any other program with that high a failure rate would have been scrapped long ago. The US has 4% of the world’s population and 25% of the incarcerated people yet you still insist that we are not locking up enough people. Maybe it is time to consider that the position you keep pushing is untenable.
First, you lift a single sentence from the quoted passage from Eide’s article and allege that it commits the fallacy of post hoc ergo prompter hoc. That is not a fair reading of the passage. That sentence is followed by others that posit reasons for a causal connection. Disagree if you like, but the implication that the connection is not supported by anything but timing is not true. You also sarcastically imply that Eide “skipped logic in college.” His bio indicates that he has a doctorate in political philosophy from Boston College. I very much doubt that he skipped logic.
Second, you falsely state that I am calling for a return to the 1970’s “war on drugs” approach. Again, that is not a fair reading of what I actually said. The old approach was to depend on enforcement alone and to impose draconian penalties for possession. My post does not endorse either. The post is discussing punishment for misdemeanors at this point, which necessarily max out at one year. Further, punishment for crime does not necessarily mean punishment for use of drugs or for possession for personal use. It includes punishment for theft and other misdemeanors, as the context makes clear. The post also calls for a combination of law enforcement with other measures, not enforcement alone.
Assuming that you did not skip logic in college either, you must surely be aware of the straw man fallacy. That is the technique where a person misrepresents what the other person said and then attacks the straw man of his own creation, rather than what the other person actually said. This is a favorite technique of people looking to score points rather than engage in meaningful discussion. It also appears to be your favorite technique.
Comments from people who disagree with us are welcome on this blog. Comments from people who merely wish to take pot shots and distort the meaning of the posts they are commenting on are not. That is why you are on moderated status at present, and that is why you will be banned altogether if you keep it up.