A Right to Rest or a Right to a Night in Jail?
A quick look at model legislation about homelessness
A great criminalization of those on the losing side of the centralization of property ownership and the financialization of daily life is underway. It’s nothing new—rounds of legislation banning public camping as well as sharing food or sitting in public seem to occur every few years. But it’s finding new support by those who stand to gain from increased surveillance and policing.
“This used to be bad policy that emerged semi-organically at the local level,” Eric Tars of The National Homeless Law Center’s legal director told Vice earlier this month. “Everyone would say, oh there's a lot of visible homelessness here, rather than addressing the underlying causes of homelessness, let’s criminalize it.”
But now model legislation is being pushed and successfully championed in multiple states. As recently reported in Vice and other news publications, the organization behind the model legislation, the Cicero Institute, has links to tech groups that produce surveillance tools for the Department of Defense and others:
Cicero was founded by Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, the surveillance tech company whose data analysis software is used by the Department of Defense, ICE, and several big city police departments. Lonsdale is also head of the venture capital firm 8VC, which has invested in dozens of companies, including Palantir, Hims, Oculus and The Boring Company. 8VC’s motto is “The world is broken, let’s fix it,” and Lonsdale has shared his thoughts on how he would fix the world in the past, including his idea to move people into private prisons and then use market-based incentives to reduce recidivism.
What does “fixing the world” look like for Cicero?
The model bill would make sleeping on public property a Class C misdemeanor punishable by a fine of up to $5,000 and a month in jail. The measure also would prohibit state funds from going to any municipality or nonprofit in cities that fail to enforce encampment bans.
We might wonder at the contradiction inherent in such legislation (would a city without state funding have the means to police encampments? would a person newly out of jail have the means to sleep anywhere other than outside?) But beyond this we can also see the clear attempt to dehumanize anyone currently without housing.
Attempting to fight against just such impulses is a different form of model legislation put out by the Western Regional Advocacy Project and attempting to establish a Right to Rest. The Oregon Right to Rest Act would specifically decriminalize the use of public spaces for survival activities (like eating and resting) and prohibit harassment based on presumed housing status of those engaged in such activities; anyone so harassed would be allowed to pursue financial compensation of a given amount in civil court. (Would such persons have access to legal counsel to claim such damages? This seems a weak portion of the legislation, in my opinion.)
As we think about the world we want to create in a future that includes an unstable climate and unstable economy, we should be clear about the options represented by these two different approaches to those least benefiting from our current economic system. One will make it harder for all of us to survive during moments of duress; the other will allow us to reconnect to the basic nature of being human, those aspects of living that we must do regardless of whether we have funds to do so. As I wrote in the essay shared several weeks ago:
Defenders of these laws [such as the Cicero Institute] will try to “assure” us that they aren’t meant, for instance, to prevent an elderly person on her walk through the neighborhood from sitting down should she become short of breath and need to rest. They would admit, then, that such laws are to be applied discriminately; that enforcers of the law should choose who they hassle and fine or jail based on visual cues that might indicate how long the person intends to sit, if they do such things regularly, if they look like the “type of person” that will be returning to permanent housing. They admit, then, that such laws are intended only for the poor, or for those whose habits might fall slightly outside the norms of a given neighborhood, or for anyone else law enforcement deems “suspicious” by their mere presence. Clearly such laws create yet another route by which racial and other forms of discrimination can turn into abusive overpolicing.
Laws that inherently rely on such discrimination are unjust laws. Moreover, they criminalize the guiltless act of being without money. By requiring that money be used to access private spaces designated appropriate for the carrying out of basic human functions—be it the catching of a breath or the relieving of a bladder—and what’s more, by threatening imprisonment of those who cannot pay—such laws criminalize our humanness.
Those who would criminalize us all—and benefit by designing the technologies that imprison us post-criminilization—have a game plan, and they’re pushing it. We would be wise to support those who offer a different path, or to take up the cause of supporting basic human activities in all spaces, before we find ourselves in a position too weak to overcome the results of the advocacy being undertaken by Cicero and others.
Readers in Oregon looking to endorse the Right to Rest Act can do so through this google doc. The bill has failed in past legislative sessions, and is unlikely to progress this year without vocal support.
If you’re interested in digging deep into the current legal fight (both legislative and in the courts) where you’re at, you might take a look at the National Homelessness Law Center’s 2022 report.
No matter where you live, there’s likely work to be done on this front, and forthcoming criminalization efforts to resist. I hope you’ll take this as a prompt to look into what’s going on, possibly behind the scenes, wherever you are.
Thanks for reading Unsettling.
Until next time,
Meg