First, panhandling should be illegal. Those that beg get jail time and those that give get a large fine.
Second, jail (for all offenses) should be a two tier system. Tier 1 is rehabilitation. People who beg or steal or commit petty violence or vandalism (etc.)are rehabilitated into productive members of society. Tier two is a human warehouse (Coventry if you will), to which go violent criminals and those for whom tier one didn’t work (after several tries for some. Tier two is a life sentence. The first day of tier one is a visit to tier two.
Most states already do some version of this, but it should be more stark. A couple of years in jail for a first time thief or a 20 year sentence for a rapist are both bad ideas (they’d go to tier 1 and tier 2 respectively under my system).
Mentally ill people are subject to a similar system (but tier one involves meds etc.).
Interesting coincidence! Just today I saw this article on a social networking news site:
Celebrities who have been homeless at one point in their lives:
John Drew Barrymore, Halle Berry, Jim Carrey, Charlie Chaplin, Kelly Clarkson, Kurt Cobain, Daniel Craig, Bobby Driscoll, George Eads, Richard Fagan, Ella Fitzgerald, Chris Gardner, Kelsey Grammer, Cary Grant, Harry Houdini, Djimon Hounsou, Eartha Kitt, David Letterman, Lil’ Kim:, Harry Edmund Martinson, Rose McGowan, Jim Morrison, George Orwell, Charles Sanders Peirce, Sally Jesse Raphael, Debbie Reynolds, Harland ‘Colonel’ Sanders, Tupac Shakur, William Shatner, Martin Sheen, Marc Singer, Hillary Swank, John Woo
All I gotta say is, wait until it happens to you. Capitalism eventually eats everyone, including you. The street is only a lost job or catastrophic illness away for most, and you’ll be wishing for a port-a-potty too.
Oh, and I meant free for them, not you, stupid. It’s my conviction that society as a whole has to help all members, not just the selfish greedy “successful” ones. There is no aspect of any human being where I would feel comfortable allowing them to starve or freeze. I am so tired of the majority attitude of fuck your neighbor. Fuck you.
The shelters kick them out at 7, and the library is a safe, warmish place where they won’t get hassled from 9-9 unless they cause trouble.
Thing is, they don’t take a damned bit of advantage of it. We offer a million classes in computer literacy and such. We have literally over a million books in this building. They are not interested if it isn’t the daily paper, the USA Today, or the UFO Times (which quit publication and they are PISSED.) If I had all day to spend at the library I’d read a real damned book, at least. I’d become an expert in auto repair. I’d learn SOMETHING. I’m sorry if I sound like an evil bitch, but if you don’t work with these people you DO NOT UNDERSTAND. The vast majority of them are scum who are not interested in improving their lot. Now, if you’ve worked with homeless people for a significant amount of time, then I’ll consider your opinion that I’m a heartless bitch, but not if you’re sitting happily in your security entrance high rise, no. You can shove that shit back up your ass, because I know what I’m talking about.
You can not read yourself into an expert in Auto repair. Try it sometime.
Kind of hard to focus when you have to go find a place in the street to sleep. Heartless is the word.
I don’t think my system just “satisfies the desire to punish.” It’s designed to re-socialize people who didn’t figure life out like we all did, and then place the real hardcore losers away where they can’t bother the rest of us.
This will all be paid for by increasing taxes on poor people. Just kidding. The goal of the system is to decrease the number of people in jail through Tier 1, so if that works then the number in Tier 2 would hopefully be less than those in jail currently (i.e., people in for 5 or 10 years), so the costs wouldn’t materially increase. Or it could be alot more expensive, I don’t freaking know.
You know, it’s one thing to get annoyed at homeless people, because they are indeed smelly and annoying. It’s another thing to hate them and wish they’d all burn in hell, or at the very least die. How about some empathy folks? Ashes to ashes and dust to dust. Are we not all brothers and sisters in this world?
If you aren’t so big on the whole universal compassion thing, then try imaging yourself in their fetid shoes. Now imagine somebody looking down upon you haughtily, judging you and declaring yourself unfit to be called human.
This thread is pissing me off. Surely the homeless problem needs to be fixed, but this isn’t the way to start.
Evidently not when it comes right down to it. We are, foremost, winners and losers. If you see it that way, then compassion is wasted on the least fortunate.
Whatever. They are very similar definitions, and I find both lacking in this thread.
Yes and no. It’s true that compassion alone can enable people and add to the downward spiral of a person’s life, but compassion combined with tough love can do wonders. Compassion by itself is a good thing, and it’s far from over-rated. YMMV.
Shelters. They mostly don’t sleep on the streets (some do, but most of them aren’t my library patrons.) They sleep in shelters. I’m not saying it’s an awesome place to spend your time, but it is most certainly not the street.
Don’t you think you’d be a little motivated to learn something if you had to live in a crappy shelter and wait for your monthly check so you could drink it away? Don’t you think you’d spend your days doing something productive, since you’re in the library already? Or would you sit around all day staring in the general direction of the paper doing nothing to better yourself and making crude comments about the librarians right at the outer reaches of their hearing? Oh, but wait, you know so much about the problem, right? I can almost certainly assure you that this heartless bitch here knows a lot more homeless people by name than you do.
The low amount of money you earn in some jobs sucks and I can see where you could be working and still be homeless, for sure. I earn a significantly larger amount than $8/hr and I still have a roommate to give me a bit more breathing room financially. But if my middle class paycheck and I see fit to have a roommate why shouldn’t someone who earns a smaller amount have a roommate too? I live in Manhattan so the cost of rent here is higher than in most places but in your scenario where one person has about $330 a month to spend on rent and utilities finding 2 roommates would mean you would then have about $990 a month for rent. In most cities in the US this would get you at the very least a 2 bedroom apartment and in many places this would be enough to get you 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms in a very safe neighborhood. If the $8/hr paycheck must support a family then that is a different story but honestly a single adult earning $8 or $9 per hour is not in the worst financial situation in the world and, short of any medical problems or serious outstanding debt, really should be able to avoid homelessness.