The Manhattanization of Our Civil Rights
It is City Hall’s police policies that created the problem of San Francisco courts’ caseloads becoming backlogged by an abundance of bullshit prosecutions brought by cops against poor and homeless people for all the little things that aren’t even against the law—merely against some rule somewhere—if you can’t find your way indoors before doing these things.
Instead of eliminating their own problems at the source, by curtailing code enforcement against indigent folks (a solution that would be both helpful and humane), City Hall wants to relieve the backlog in the courts’ caseload—the administrative backwash from City Hall’s campaign of poverty pogroms—by fast-tracking these prosecutions through new poverty courts at the expense of the civil and due-process rights and Constitutional protections allegedly afforded all of US, including San Francisco’s poor and homeless people.
If San Francisco were to adopt a New York-style model, here is an example of just how raw the deal could get:
I am homeless. I am human. Eventually, I need sleep. Anywhere I try to get some sleep—whether it is in a doorway, on the sidewalk, or under a freeway ramp—I will eventually get a ticket for sleeping illegally. (8th Amendment: Cruelty)
Before I go to poverty court, I’m required to plead guilty on all counts, regardless of the facts. (5th Amendment: Self-Incrimination)
When I go to poverty court, I will receive a sentence of hours or days of community service, or participation in a program of some sort. (13th Amendment: Involuntary Servitude/Slavery)
Before, during, and after I serve my sentence, I am still homeless. I am still human. Eventually, I need sleep again—on the sidewalk, in a doorway, or wherever I can find. Probably in the same places I was sleeping before going to poverty court. Before very long, I will get another ticket for sleeping illegally. This ticket will re-trigger a re-charging of the previous citation. (5th Amendment: Double Jeopardy)
I will now stand accused of two counts of sleeping illegally, even though I have already served a sentence for one by performing community service or participating in a program of some sort. Performing the community service or going through the program will not have benefited me at all. It will simply have provided free labor to some City agency or a free statistic for some program provider to count me as a client on their next grant proposal. After all is said and done, I will be more pimped-out and exploited than if my case had never been heard in poverty court in the first place.
People already deal with issues that make it hard for them to complete sentences, (e.g., fleeing domestic violence, losing all personal property including court documents, street violence, mental health complications). Homelessness compounds all these issues and makes it more difficult to cope. In light of all this, it seems highly likely that most poverty court defendants will not complete the typically required sentence prior to the eventual deadline and will end up being re-charged with the initial citation. All of the community service hours and days up to that point will go down the drain and the lucky defendants get to start all over from the beginning. The unlucky ones will get fines and/or jail time. The New York model proposed for use in San Francisco does not dismiss infraction citations on behalf of accused persons. Instead, it discharges infraction citations making the most probable result even for people who complete their poverty court sentence is that instead of just being threatened, harassed, cited, arrested, and put in jail just once for these life sustaining functions, they will now serve multiple sentences.
Poverty courts cannot and do not provide housing or alleviate poverty. On the contrary, new poverty courts will draw resources already drawn thin into a bureaucratic quagmire and away from genuine solutions.
Karl