Lawmakers in Louisiana are weighing new policies that align with the vision for addressing America’s homelessness crisis outlined by President Donald Trump last summer. This approach breaks with a misguided, decades-old national practice of offering homeless people publicly funded support without also asking them to help themselves. In response, outraged activists have compared Louisiana’s proposals to nothing less than the Jim Crow laws that mandated racial segregation in the era before the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
In a statement about the Louisiana bill, the activist coalition Housing Not Handcuffs referenced “chain gangs” and “entrenched white supremacy.” The National Homelessness Law Center declared that the bill evokes “debtors’ prisons, convict leasing, and Jim Crow.” Other activists compared the bill to slavery.
What monstrous policy could justify such over-the-top comparisons? Apparently, one that merely prohibits homeless people from sleeping on the streets and offers them treatment and services in lieu of criminal adjudication.
States’ Crisis
Like many states, Louisiana is not experiencing a homelessness crisis as much as an unsheltered homelessness crisis. Homelessness has actually decreased by 34 percent overall statewide, but those improvements have not helped homeless people who live on the streets instead of in shelter. The share of homeless people in Louisiana who are living physically on the streets rose by 50 percent over that same period.
Louisiana state Rep. Debbie Villio’s bill, House Bill 211, aims to address this subpopulation specifically by giving people in encampments a choice between shelter, treatment, or the criminal justice system. Communities around the country — from San Francisco to Austin and Salt Lake City to Miami — have enacted similar laws in response to the humanitarian disasters playing out on the streets of cities that do not regulate camping.
Each effort has met the incendiary rhetoric that has become a trademark of homelessness activists. In The New York Times, the National Homelessness Law Center compared Utah’s proposal to offer psychiatric services to homeless people to both Japanese internment camps and the Holocaust. And in each of these cases, the rhetoric of activists could not be further divorced from the reality of the policies being proposed.
In the year following Kentucky’s implementation of a similar street camping ban, despite outcry about “criminalizing homelessness” from activists, the vast majority of homeless people living on the street were not funneled into the criminal justice system. Only 32 individuals — out of more than 1,700 people living on the street — were charged with misdemeanors for repeated violations. Another 393 people were charged with non-jailable first offenses, many of whom were also offered diversionary services.
Louisiana’s supposed “New Jim Crow” bill is a far cry from the punitive fever dream purported by these groups. Instead, it aligns with Kentucky’s proportionate and compassionate response to unregulated homeless encampments.
A Pathway out of the Criminal Justice System
HB 211 regulates street camping in a similar way to how Louisiana regulates the “crime” of littering. In fact, the maximum fines for both offenses are the same. But unlike those “punitive” littering laws, HB 211 offers homeless people arrested for crimes — including both misdemeanors and felonies unrelated to street camping regulations — a pathway out of the criminal justice system if they accept treatment and services for their underlying behavioral health problems.
Although the activists won’t admit it, the need for such treatment is significant. In Louisiana, the number of people living on the street with addiction issues has climbed by 25 percent in just the past five years. Many others have severe mental illness, or both addictions and mental illness. Few of these individuals are well enough to willingly accept the treatment they need. To only give treatment to those who are willing is a cruel underestimation of the debilitation caused by addiction and mental illness.
Pathways to assistance are built into policies like Louisiana’s. When cities ban street camping, local courts often set up specialized dockets that focus on homelessness. These dockets, commonly known as “homeless courts,” help disentangle vulnerable people (who are often both victims and perpetrators of crimes) from the criminal justice system.
Not all homeless people would participate in this program; it would engage only those who have broken the law. Not all homeless people who break the law would be eligible, either. These courts have considerable discretion to match people who are primarily homeless and secondarily criminals with support while ensuring that those who are primarily criminals and secondarily homeless are held fully responsible for their crimes.
Rebuilding Self-Sufficiency
What is asked of participants in return for this publicly funded support and diversion from the criminal justice system? That they participate in the services and that they contribute, whenever possible, to the cost of the program through their modest funds or community service. If they are totally unable to contribute, the court has discretion to waive the costs in full.
These requirements are about more than reciprocity. Requiring individuals to contribute to their own sustenance and rehabilitation helps rebuild a sense of purpose, dignity, and self-sufficiency among a population that sorely needs all of those.
No one can deny that life on the street is a nightmare. Policies like this are our best chance at helping the homeless get the treatment and services they need to build stable, flourishing lives. Does that sound like the New Jim Crow to you?
Louisiana’s lawmakers are not the first to come under fire from polemical activists who resist common-sense approaches to homelessness in favor of protecting the failing status quo. But policymakers and the public alike understand that ultimately lives are at stake, and that it is irresponsible to allow people to remain in the throes of unsheltered homelessness and addiction. Louisiana’s new approach balances accountability with compassion and holds tremendous potential to improve the lives of those living on the streets and the communities struggling to live beside them.
