Poverty Courts: Easy Answer, No Solution
San Francisco is once again threatening to adopt an elitist and paternalistic approach to addressing the city’s homeless population. On Thursday, May 24, Mayor Gavin Newsom conducted a walk-through of possible sites for his proposed Community Justice Courts, courts that will further criminalize poor people in this city, despite the administration’s insistence that it is trying to help. It was not surprising, therefore, that Newsom’s press aide blatantly locked representing members of the Coalition on Homelessness out of this overly ceremonious event, only letting me in after protesting censorship of the Street Sheet’s coverage.
The Coalition on Homelessness and Chris Daly, the district supervisor representing the Tenderloin and South of Market areas, are the biggest advocates against these courts. The Mayor’s “special courts,” as he terms them, are to be set up to deal with “quality of life” crimes in the Tenderloin. However, the Coalition proposes that these courts should be termed exactly what they are—poverty courts—because they will primarily target and criminalize the homeless population in the city’s lowest-income sector.
What is most disturbing about these courts is that the officials overseeing their implementation are not concerned with the populations that will be directly affected. “Can I be honest with you?” said a homeless citizen standing outside the building, “He doesn’t want to help us.” The woman was right. Based on the New York model, these special courts force people to plead guilty for non-violent offenses that are directly linked to homelessness, such as sleeping on the streets and urinating in public. Instead of looking at solving the root causes of homelessness, the most blatant being the extreme lack of affordable housing, they attempt to look productive by bandaging the situation for constituents that have no knowledge of where the heart of the problem really lies.
These courts force people to plead guilty for actions that they have no personal control over. These actions are referred to as “quality of life offenses,” blatantly pointing to the fact that the only reason that the City views sleeping on the streets as criminal is because it is offensive to some wealthier constituents in the area and affects their perceived quality of life while they walk into their comfortable homes or to their jobs. Someone should not have to plead guilty to something that is not a crime.
According to the model that Newsom wants to adopt, however, if a person does not plead guilty, they will be sent directly to the regular court system—a system that is extremely costly and time-consuming for people who struggle from day to day just to survive without housing. If a person concedes and does plead guilty, they will be forced to engage in community service. This translates to indentured servitude—it is forced work without pay that arises directly from these so-called crimes committed by people that have no other option. Do the Mayor, the District Attorney, and the City’s judges really believe that urinating in public and sleeping on the streets are personal choices?
During the press conference, District Attorney Kamala Harris directly stated that these courts would be, “the beginning of something that will have a great impact on the quality of life of people that live in this city and work in this city.” Although she tried to stress the fact that these courts would be offering services to people, it became more and more apparent during the press conference that this plan of action was being taken to serve the wealthier populations in these areas whose “quality of life” was apparently lessened by the presence of poverty and the symptoms of homelessness in their neighborhoods.
She went on to state that they were “leveraging the power of the court” to emphasize “the way people should behave.” This statement highlighted the paternalistic nature of these courts, treating the homeless population, a population she endearingly labeled “them”—as children who must be taught how to behave, rather than treating homeless people as people. On top of this, Mayor Newsom said, “We will look at the criminal justice system in a way we haven’t,” in order to instill a sense of, “self-sufficiency and dignity,” in a population that he implied must not already possess these traits.
This sort of condescending, patronizing, quick-fix mentality was further displayed during my brief interaction with Superior Court Judge David Ballati, the judge who will be most influential in the formation and implementation of this court system. When I spoke with Judge Ballati to see if I could ask him a quick question, he tried to blow me off and act busy, although he had just been speaking with another reporter for more than twenty minutes. Exasperated, he finally stated what I found to be the most pervasive attitude toward this issue: “I don’t need a quick question—you can take as long as you want with the question as long as there’s an easy answer.” None of these officials, although they tried to humbly admit that their approaches had not been working before, want to actually spend the time o
Katy
