Yesterday the supreme court ruled in the case City of Grants Pass v. Johnson that cities can enforce bans on homeless people sleeping in public places, even if those individuals have nowhere else to go. Even if the shelters are full (which they are likely to be).
I cant even wrap my head around how wrong that is. It’s taken me about 18 hours to even process that, before I could come and do what I do with my opinion (disperse it it all over the internet).
This is what it looks like to me: first you charge the already impoverished and marginalized unhoused people with some bullshit city/town ordinance charge. Next you give them a court date that they’ll likely be unable to make (trust me, I’ve tried to make it to court while I’m living on the street, very challenging). When they don’t make their court appearance, you issue a bench warrant, so the next time they encounter law enforcement they can be arrested on the bench warrant, then you’ve got them in a county jail. Even if they did appear for the ordinance violation, the first offense is likely to be a fine that they have no financial resources to actually pay, leading to county jail. Sure, they could get out on cash bail, but with what money? So, now you can effectively round up the homeless in your community and put them in a cycle of incarceration indefinitely.
Being that we have the highest incarceration rate in the world, these jails are overcrowded already. We are definitely going to have to build new ones.
which brings me to something you’re going to see a lot of in this particular post on evr0ck17.medium.com: corporate profits. You know who turns our tax dollars into their profit: private prison companies like CoreCivic and the GEO group. It’s a good deal for the government, because their resources to build and run these things are already stretched thin. It’s not just building them either, somebody has to make sure that they have the supplies that they need to function. Looks like profit for companies like Bob Barker, and Global Tel Link. Would you believe that investment firms think it’s a wise move to invest in these companies? Of course it is, look at the profits they make… More money to the investor class.
Once you have the poor folks in jail in an endless cycle, it’s best to put them to work. Everyone knows that’s good for the rehabilitation of people who don't exactly function within the norm of society, and you can offset a lot of the costs of your prisons by getting companies to pay for products that can be generated by the incarcerated homeless people. Those companies are happy to do it. Who wouldn't want to pay 11 to 17 cents an hour for a employee that theyve been paying damn near 10$ an hour to make the same product? C’mon, that’s just good business to cut costs to maximize profit, ask any shareholder.
How fucking greedy are these people? right? they already make a killing with wage slavery for the people that work for them for the bare minimum that they can legally pay them, with the absolute bare minimum of benefits they can grant them, and the ability to throw them out with the rubbish when they aren’t effective workers any more. Now, they need to round up and incarcerate society’s most vunreble population so that they can become a whole new workforce of slave labor.
Lets just think about the richest man in the world- Jeff Bezos. There is no concievable way that Amazon, with it’s infinitely complex supply chain doesn’t benefit from prison labor somewhere along the line. In fact Whole Foods has been caught red handed using the the nearly free labor of incarcerated people. Jeff Bezos has more money than even he can even understand, but it’s not enough, costs can still be cut.
But it doesn’t stop there. Investment firms that trade in shares of prison industrial companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group are also buying up single-family houses and apartment buildings en masse. These firms, like BlackRock and Vanguard, are turning our housing market into another profit machine, driving up property prices and rents, and pushing more people into homelessness. It’s a vicious cycle: they profit from incarcerating the homeless and then profit again by making housing unaffordable, ensuring a steady supply of people to fill their jails and work for pennies on the dollar.
They are going to make a buck either fucking way. Don’t want to pay them to live in one of the houses they own? fine, they’ll enslave you in one of the prisons they profit from.
This is more than just a housing crisis or a criminal justice issue — it’s systemic exploitation. The rich get richer by exploiting the most vulnerable among us, creating policies and systems that ensure their profits continue to grow. The criminalization of homelessness is not about public safety or community well-being; it’s about maintaining a cycle of poverty and incarceration that benefits the wealthy elite.
We need to recognize this for what it is: a gross abuse of power and a blatant disregard for human dignity. It’s time to stand up against these injustices and demand a system that works for everyone, not just the privileged few.
I’m not going to call for violence on the internet, that’s not a great idea, i’ll just say that I doubt we can petition, protest, and vote our way into righting these wrongs.
