From Penn Law Review:
More than one-third of the 580,000 homeless people in the United States
are unsheltered.1 This population includes those who sleep on the street, in
cars, in abandoned buildings, and in other places not intended for human
housing.2 Some unsheltered homeless individuals choose to forego sleeping
in a shelter, perhaps out of concern for their safety or because their work
prevents them from abiding by a shelter’s curfew. Others, meanwhile, are
forced to sleep in public spaces because of insufficient shelter capacity.
The number of unsheltered homeless individuals has soared during the
COVID-19 pandemic. Homeless shelters across the country have closed due
to the pandemic, and those that remained open saw an exodus of residents
who feared exposure to the virus in close quarters.3 Given that the virus
ultimately proved to be much less transmissible outdoors,4 this mass
dislocation of homeless people may very well have saved lives.
But living in public spaces risks devastating consequences. In cities across
the United States, laws target basic human conduct that unsheltered homeless
people perform in public, such as sleeping, camping, sitting, lying down, and
loitering.5 These antihomeless laws impose a range of civil and criminal
penalties on the conduct they prohibit; this Comment focuses on criminal
laws, because prosecuting homeless individuals—a common occurrence6—poses a particular risk: it undermines their ability to gain and maintain employment,
the surest way out of poverty.7 Continue reading >>>
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