Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor? | Hacker News Reader

Is It Now a Crime to Be Poor?

nytimes.com

81 pointsblasdel74 comments

Ugh. My lovely cafe is in an edge neighborhood. Things were looking up and then a day labor place opened up on the block.

Not all day laborers are homeless but many are. Initially I was very laissez faire about them but eventually they began to create a mess of empty bottles and trash, and harass the customers.

It killed business. It ended up taking about 4 months of calling the police on a daily basis and getting dozens of homeless trespass warranted to get things back on track.

It sucks but I felt I had little choice. If I had left things alone I would have gone out of business. Defaulted on my loan and had to lay off 12 people.

What you gonna do, this problem is huge.

I hate to ask, but are there any organizations that could have helped? (And maybe still can) Maybe some church or homeless shelter that you could donate to that would use your donations bring free breakfasts for day laborers a few blocks away?

I'm not sure how to solve the problem for your city, but it would help them out and solve your problem without anyone getting locked up. Not to mention providing a little bit of PR for doing an honest favor to the working poor. Combine that with something like city harvest (end of day food that would usually get tossed out is picked up and distributed to hungry people) and I'd go out of my way to eat at your cafe.

The answer is no. Nobody gives a shit but the local business owners. Sure, someone will give them food... and they'll gather at that spot for more.

This is a really common situation: local business owners are put in a position of being the bad guy and using the police against the homeless, because the rest of society chooses not to care for these people.

This is how and why the 'bum bot' was created. http://www.oterrills.com/bumbot.htm Its a terrible thing, and yet Rufus is not a villain. Society's burden was placed on his doorstep. He responded with a squirt gun robot. That neighborhood is very, very dangerous because of the shelters. It sucks.

As a cafe owner... I don't think there is much you can do. As far as I can tell, you did the right thing (or certainly not the wrong thing). The problem is that this is happening in the first place...

I'm not sure i can reasonably come up with a solution. My first thought is to have more shelters, some policies about not enforcing crimes that a) don't hurt people and b) are unavoidable and lessons for cops on dealing with the homeless in a productive manner, but I am as far from an expert as one can me. Anyone with more knowledge on this topic have any ideas?

Edit: Sorry, I went a little off track here. Obviously what was happening did hurt you (in the form of lost business), but I'm seeing what happened as the end result of a problem.

Just be willing to learn.

http://www.nrc.nl/international/article2321531.ece/No_more_h...

Sorry, not sure how this helps dan_the_welder or any other care owner in the situation described?

The problem is the bums themselves. Japanese homeless don't make garbage messes or harass people. They generally manage to peacefully scrape by without imposing themselves. It's much the same in other more homogeneous industrialized countries as best I can tell.

The problem is the American underclass.

Do you think you'll also be upset when the edge neighborhood becomes bougie? Or is that the general purpose of these kinds of businesses moving into poor places?

I am sorry, but this is a most asinine logic. Correlating "the opening of a day laborer place on the block" with your failing business does not make sense.

Defaulted on my loan and had to lay off 12 people.

So how are these 12 people you laid off different from the day laborers? I've worked countless restaurant gigs, and restaurant work definitely counts as "day labor". The problem that people like you don't understand is what it's like to not own anything. You can't take out a loan against something you don't own.

In Los Angeles, the fine for truancy is $250; in Dallas, it can be as much as $500 — crushing amounts for people living near the poverty level. According to the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, an advocacy group, 12,000 students were ticketed for truancy in 2008.

Why does the Bus Riders Union care? Because it estimates that 80 percent of the “truants,” especially those who are black or Latino, are merely late for school, thanks to the way that over-filled buses whiz by them without stopping. I met people in Los Angeles who told me they keep their children home if there’s the slightest chance of their being late. It’s an ingenious anti-truancy policy that discourages parents from sending their youngsters to school.

"thanks to the way that over-filled buses whiz by them without stopping."

This is not uncommon here in Pittsburgh, either, and I'm sure plays no small part in people's decisions whether to drive their own car vs. use public transit. If you can't even schedule your day because you don't know if the bus driver will actually stop for you and there can be an hour wait for the next bus, public transit is not a viable option. Or if it's the last bus that whizzes past you, do you go back into your office and sleep under your desk, or what?

In Japan, of course, they just forcibly push everyone onto the train, which is a better solution than not letting people get on, in my opinion.

Here in Tokyo, I see a lot of people sleeping in cardboard boxes outside. They've never bothered me; frankly, I'd prefer them to be there. It forces you to acknowledge their existence, and I'd rather they be there than in jail and being driven into a life of crime.

The odd thing is that you sometime run into Yakuza chimpira types who drag them by the neck and tell them to get lost (especially if there is a political rally going on nearby; go figure)

Great article. I think it points out something that lawmakers should be aware of.

I'm not sure I see how this bit fits in (and unfortunately I think this also makes it less likely that the rest of the article will get the attention it deserves): And if you should make the mistake of trying to escape via a brief marijuana-induced high, it’s “gotcha” all over again, because that of course is illegal too.

You can argue for or against the legalization of drugs, but (unlike needing to sleep in a cardboard box) smoking marijuana is not a necessary outcome of being poor. You can try to argue that its necessary as an escape from reality, but this is surely not as strong an argument. Nor is it the case that this is a crime committed exclusively by the poor.

I think you can make a very solid case that crimes of the rich - war, fraud and expropriation of public funds - outweigh the crimes of the poor by quite a margin.

There were just short of 17,000 murders last year. Are you seriously going to suggest that they were committed primarily by the rich?

I'd much rather lose money to Bernie Madoff than get killed in a botched robbery. Losing part of your retirement << losing your life.

Playing devil’s advocate:

America has killed 200,000+ people in Iraq an Afghanistan over the last 7 years which is greater than 17,000 * 7. Now add all those killed by poor pollution controls and our ass backward private medical system and... [rage]

PS: Per capita the Rich cause more harm and more benefit in society because they have more power to change things. It’s easier to help and hurt a large number of people with a coal power plant than it is with a single gun.

No - and I don't see how you could interpret my comment thusly. I'm contrasting murders to state murder, i.e. wars, which are of course started by the elite of the country/ countries involved.

And, in developed/first-world/etc. countries, have a habit of not killing a terribly large number of countrymen, most of whom more or less volunteered for the job anyway. (Presumably, they were in fact aware of what joining the military entails.) So it isn't really a crime of the rich against their own countrymen, at least.

If you think people volunteered to go off and get involved with war then you are possibly delusional. Most of my friends that joined the reserves (the ones that were supposed to be helping natural disasters really) volunteered to defend their country. Starting a war in Iraq was something they didn't volunteer for. And millions of killed civlians is something else they didn't volunteer for either.

I agree entirely, which is why I said that it wasn't a crime "against their own countrymen, at least." Everything else is distinctly less ambiguous, as you point out.

I was mainly addressing your point on fraud and expropriation of public funds. Compare that to violent crimes, which are committed primarily by the poor.

On wars: wars are started by officials selected by a broad swath of the public. At least 50% (+/- epsilon) of the population, rich and poor alike, share the blame.

What is the demographic profile of voters? Ah, I see we can get some data here: http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/voting.html

Here's some data:

    .Less than $10,000	41.3
    .$10,000 to $14,999	41.2
    .$15,000 to $19,999	44.3
    .$20,000 to $29,999	48.0
    .$30,000 to $39,999	54.4
    .$40,000 to $49,999	58.2
    .$50,000 to $74,999	65.9
    .$75,000 to $99,999	72.6
    .$100,000 to $149,999	74.9
    .$150,000 and over	78.1

Now there's an interesting correlation between voting participation and income, eh?

In what kind of media do you think elite consensus-generating mechanism plays out? National Enquirer? New York Post? New York Times? And how poor are the participants in such consensus-generating mechanisms?

The idea that the rich and powerful aren't at the heart of determining a country's political opinion, and consequent military aggression is, to be quite frank, desperately naive.

Sure. I was just trying to point out two things. 1) While the rest of the article presents great points, this point is much weaker. 2) Lawmakers need to take the content of this article to heart. Unfortunately, the mention of drugs will probably make that less likely.

Very true. Another difference is, the rich choose to commit crimes, the poor don't (at least in the majority of the cases). That homeless guy at the street corner didn't choose to be homeless, but someone like Madoff, chose to commit fraud, knowing fully what he was doing.

> didn't choose to be homeless

Let's be realistic here. One generally ends up in that situation by exercising bad judgment and choices over time.

Perhaps this is true in some strictly literal sense, but we could argue all day about whether the responsibility for that judgement and those choices really lies with the homeless person in question, or with our culture, education, and society.

If a lot of apparently sane people make (disastrously) bad choices, I think it should be our first inclination to consider where the bad choices are coming from, and perhaps try to help them make better ones, before we dismiss the issue as some individual flaw.

Let's be realistic here: you don't know what you're talking about at best.

Those who are homeless tend to be so for a few reasons: * Being a battered wife who has finally decided to leave her husband; * Being mentally ill without the support structure to ensure that you have all of the (expensive!) medications you require and/or treatments that keep you stable enough to be productive to society; * Losing one's home to a fire or other disaster without sufficient insurance to recover from it (if one could even afford or qualify for insurance) or where the insurance company refused to pay for legitimate damages (see also Katrina); * ...and exercising bad judgement and choices over time.

Stop being a judgemental ass.

Any of those you said, can happen to anyone, anytime. If a family is living paycheck to paycheck, something like this happens, they can be financially ruined and become homeless in just a few months.

Not sure why kingkongrevenge is so harsh.

Yes, they might have been irresponsible, might have made bad choices. But many people end up homeless, for reasons outside their control (bankruptcy, families abandoning them etc). In any case, their 'crimes' are nothing compared to those like Madoff.

These homeless people need help, not punishment and fines.

EDIT: Just remembered this http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/cnn.heroes/archive/anne.mahlum.h...

Programs like those would have far more impact than jail.

> reasons outside their control (bankruptcy, families abandoning them etc)

Those reasons are usually well under individual control.

I suspect that Ehrenreich was writing for an audience that sees recreational pot use as one of those "technically illegal but who cares" crimes, like jaywalking or driving five miles over the speed limit.

The smell of marijuana comes out of my next-door neighbor's house on a daily basis. One of the guys who lives there has a criminal record. We are literally two blocks from the nearest police station. And yet nobody in that house is getting busted for marijuana possession (even before MA partially decriminalized it).

The author is well known for writing books and articles that describe the U.S. way of life in the worst possible terms. In one book, she pretended to be uneducated and unskilled, then tried to survive on a minimum wage job. She found, to no one's surprise, that it was difficult. Her conclusion was not that you should strive to do better than that--it was that society and the government should make it easier to scrape along with minimal effort. Her other writings take a similar least-common-denominator approach to every issue, and end with demands for ever more money funnelled to those who put forth the least effort. Her heart is in the right place, but she wants the safety net to be impossibly vast.

I thought "nickled and dimed" was good, as it made the interesting point that for the low-paying jobs, it is very hard to get affordable housing.

One thing that she did not explore while she was working in the maid service is that of working in the manager's shoes. Her approach is to work the low-paying jobs herself to walk in their shoes, but did not do so for the manager. That would also have been enlightening.

I was just thinking about this last night while driving through some very poor neighborhoods near downtown, imagining what kind of childhood those kids were leading and what kind of future there was for them.

The fact that I am being paid to, essentially, automate-away good paying jobs is a bit disconcerting at times. Hopefully efficiencies in the market will breed new kinds of work... but I have some serious doubts.

This reminds me of a ted talk about industrial farming and white bread. The argument usually goes that industrial farming destroys small farmers jobs, but the speaker instead argued that it allows community to be able to afford more food for less money and frees up a significant population from working in the fields. While short term people loose their farming jobs, long term society is able to do more with less.

The question becomes when do the unemployed catch up with the "progress".

...when they take hold of their own destiny. Make something or provide a service at a price people are willing to pay. Really, isn't every would-be founder in the same place? No way to eat unless they can get someone (YC, VC and ultimately customer)to pay them?

Sure, with some skill that can be monetized. I don't have statistics, but I would be willing to bet that not many farmers have CS backgrounds (or other backgrounds that can be monetized easily).

I'm not against progress, but I think statements like this ignore the difficulty involved. Even for someone who does "take hold of their own destiny" they may well need to through retraining, etc...

Using the farmers as an example, how would you suggest a 45 year old farmer do (for the sake of argument, assume he/she needs to support a kid or two) when his/her job gets automated away?

What should the farmer do? Deal with this crazy thing called life. No one said it was fair. Perhaps he could have seen the end coming and starting moving towards gaining new skills. Perhaps it really blind-sided him and now he's screwed working two jobs for a fraction of his original income.

In any event, life is a bitch. Jobs become obsolete. Yes it is easy to say this while I currently have a comfortable life with job and family, but don't think for a second that I haven't considered what would happen if something tragic happened.

I'm so sick of people complaining about life's hard knocks and how they can't deal with them. Some people will get screwed. They don't have the mental capacity and/or work ethic to deal with the problem and they get left behind. Other people adapt. They start over if they have to. They get new much lower paying jobs and adjust their budget. They downgrade their living arrangements. They get government assistance. What they don't do is give up.

This is a highly emotional article, which sets off a lot of alarms for me. I found several places in the article where I felt the author was doing a lot of hand-waving and navel-gazing.

But instead of critiquing the article, I would encourage people who are interested in homelessness to actually learn about and help homeless people -- don't sit around reading what one person wants you to think and feel proud that you're one of the few that "gets it" This is a tough subject, and at the end of the day, after learning and understanding what is going on, you might end up taking the side of the cities in some of these cases. I'm not saying the author is wrong -- "confused" might be a better term to use.

> This is a highly emotional article, which sets off a lot of alarms for me. I found several places in the article where I felt the author was doing a lot of hand-waving and navel-gazing.

Generally a good sign that it ought to be flagged, especially since the emotional content is not about how people are wasting their lives using vim when they could be using emacs, or something in a similar vein.

I've about had it with the vim and emacs fanboys, davidw. I think maybe I've flagged five articles in the three years I've been here.

But some of us (ahem), are much quicker to flag than others!

I'm always for mixing up the topics to get things a little more interesting. Do homeless people prefer emacs, vim, or ed? Is Apple using the iPhone to keep Latino kids from attending school? I don't know -- anything but the same fifteen types of stories over and over again.

If they had somehow involved twitter in this, it would have been okay. Also if it had come from techcrunch.

Okay, okay, kidding...to me, hacker news is "news for hackers" -> Things Hackers will enjoy -> not lolcats and news about 4chan -> not reddit.

This article has brought out all of the hang-wringing and self-hate that I can put up with for a while. I like realistic depictions of problems and solutions a lot more than I do talking about how miserable everything is. It's truly brought out the pessimist in most all of the commenters. Davidw is right -- time to flag.

Ehrenreich is anything but confused on this matter. There is a societal failure here and the criminalization of being poor is a further failure.

As I pointed out in another comment, a large part of the modern urban homeless problem is related to the fact that we don't have mental institutions the way we used to. I'm glad we don't, but when we eliminated them we didn't come up with alternatives to house and treat the people who needed them.

If anyone is interested in learning a good deal about what it "feels like" to be poor, I highly recommend reading "Down and Out in Paris and London", George Orwell's first book.

“They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless.”

Any society which in any way thinks this makes sense needs to take a good, deep look at itself and then start thinking over.

As the child of a veteran, the part that offends me is that a guy who literally took a bullet on the behalf of the rest of us is now just a nuisance to be hustled out of sight by the police. Americafail.

Wish I could upvote you more guy.

Personally, I think the fact that so many of our homeless are veterans should be criminal. But this is a democracy, and I am out voted.

But he was a veteran of a war that they lost.

I get more than a whiff of morality being correlated to income, and a lack of respect for the winds of fortune here. The idea that good people work hard, and hard work is rewarded, therefore only bad people are poor and it's their own punishment.

It's one thing to be poor. It's quite another to be homeless. Also, don't forget that at least for a while we are still free; the homeless are not destined to stay in the gutter if they don't want to. We have no castes in America.

That's a nice, but false, sentiment (that we don't have castes in America). The castes in America are more subtle and fuzzier than those in India, but that makes them no less real.

The reality is that the vast majority of the chronic homeless are both poor and physically or mentally ill (or both). It's a natural consequence of the closing of so many mental institutions (which in and of itself is not a bad thing) without providing alternative treatment and housing options (which in and of itself is a bad thing).

Add all of this to the fact that it is by and large expensive to be poor and you end up with large groups in America who are unable to shift their fortunes in any meaningful way.

Yes, there will be a few fortunate individuals that manage to claw their way out of being poor in America (and they will be held up as examples by all sides, missing the point that they are the exception for a reason!), but in general people who are poor in America stay poor in America.

[I suspect that one could substitute "Canada" or "France" or "England" or most other Western countries for "America" here, even if the problems and reasons are slightly different. Toronto has a substantial chronic homeless problem because of idiotic downloading of social programs from the province to the city and subsequent reduction of mental health programs. Note as well that I'm differentiating between chronic homeless and temporary homeless; your statement about "not destined to stay..." is true for the temporary homeless. The original article is mostly about the chronic homeless.]

Do you have statistics on homelessness before the mental institutions were closed down? Obviously we'd need to find a way to time-adjust them but I'd be curious to compare.

I don't; it's not something that I research personally. However, there appear to be links to interesting sources here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deinstitutionalisation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_the_United_Stat...

http://www.nrchmi.samhsa.gov/Channel/View.aspx?id=18 http://www.nationalhomeless.org/factsheets/

The general impression that I've obtained in my casual reading of this over the years is that (a) there have always been "indigents", but (b) the numbers have gone way up since the 1960s and (c) a disproportionate number of "indigents"/homeless have been those with mental illnesses.

They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless.

Inaccurate and sensationalist. Earlier in the same paragraph:

It turned out that Mr. Szekely, who is an ordained minister and does not drink, do drugs or curse in front of ladies, did indeed have a warrant - for not appearing in court to face a charge of "criminal trespassing"

He wasn't arrested for being homeless; he was arrested for an outstanding warrant.

You may or may not be arrested, charged, or convicted for other crimes, but one thing's for sure: law enforcement seems to take it personally when you don't appear. Anyone with an outstanding warrant risks immediate arrest at any time. The reasonableness of the original charge doesn't matter.

And what was the warrant for? Was it not for sleeping on the sidewalk, i.e. being homeless?

No, it was for not appearing in court.

Yea, but on a charge of trespassing which was possibly related to his being homeless and looking for food or something.

If he was homeless, how was he supposed to get a letter telling him to show up in court at all?

Yeah he got arrested for being homeless.

What? Homeless people can't get served anymore?

What do you suggest the police do? Just forget about expecting homeless people to make their court dates? Or perhaps homeless people can be exempt from certain types of crimes? Maybe we should just immediately throw them in jail, because there not going to be able to come back to court -- they're homeless.

When you're charged, you know there will be a court date, whether you have an address or not. It's your responsibility to show up for it, homeless or not. Simply because you don't get your mail doesn't mean that somehow society is punishing you for being homeless -- lots of people miss court dates and end up in jail for it.

Come on guys, use some critical thinking skills here. [Now I got sucked into this. Geesh]

Simply because you don't get your mail doesn't mean that somehow society is punishing you for being homeless -- lots of people miss court dates and end up in jail for it.

Anatole France: "The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread."

There is no natural law passed down from the heavens that decrees that you can later be arrested and jailed for not responding to a court summons in a timely fashion, regardless of circumstance, and regardless of the severity of the original charge. Just because it's the way it is doesn't mean that it is necessarily fair, just, or reasonable.

Come on guys, use some critical thinking skills here.

Not commenting on the rest of your post, using my critical thinking, it would seem odd at best to expect people without a home, without an address, to be able to read or respond to mail. And court-dates are rarely if ever decided at the time of apprehension.

If your primary goal is merely to stay alive, I think you will find your priorities somewhat different from the ones had by the rest of society.

But I can see this going on and on. You have your point of view, I have mine. We're obviously not going to agree, so let's leave it at that.

I'm willing to let it go, with one caveat: getting, reading, and responding to mail is a different problem from failing to appear in court. We can solve the first one, but conflating the two doesn't help any.

It sounds like there is an opportunity for people to help homeless folks by providing them with post office boxes and voice mail. Seems like I read that a lot of charities are already doing that? Wouldn't that be a cool startup idea? (if you could find a way to monetize it)

To me, this conversation has the same problem that homelessness itself has (and I speak from experience). You can either look at everything like an obstacle or like an opportunity.

The court date was likely written on the ticket the police officer handed him. No letter involved.

They don't say. It could be he was breaking into houses. Speculating isn't going to be productive.

Wrong. They do say. It was, in fact, for sleeping on a sidewalk. Did you even read the article?

The very fact that he had a "criminal tresspassing" charge in the first place — for sleeping on a public sidewalk, as you neglect to mention — reinforces the thesis of this piece.

When zero tolerance was hailed by "scientists" showing off the "smashed window theory" and proving it by smashing windows poverty was just for the fringe groups. The "blacks", Latinos or other people generally discriminated against in the US. Now that the middle class descends into poverty rapidly the NYT starts to care?

Zero tolerance means a war on the poor. Like the "war on terror" or "the war on drugs" it does not solve the problem at all.

Poverty is always relative. You can be poor with the same amount of money the next guy is still OK with. Poverty depends largely on sociological factors. People who are embedded in some kind of social order, who partake in society, are respected and have human relations to other people aren't as poor as those who are isolated, spat upon and criminalized.

I'd recommend reading The Grapes of Wrath, one of the greatest works of American literature and written during the Great Depression for some solutions.

The solution is to tell the mentally ill, permanently homeless people about the rabbits again, then euthanize them as painlessly as possible? Ouch.

Wrong book, dude. You're thinking about Of Mice and Men.

Dammit, back to junior high English for me. Still puzzled about the "solutions," though.

What are you talking about? Your obnoxious "reply" has nothing to do with either the article nor my comment.

Its a crime to be rich, the government charges exorbitant fees if you have some extra money.

It's ironic that the top 10 "meanest" cities are some of the most liberal.

"By far the most reliable way to be criminalized by poverty is to have the wrong-color skin. Indignation runs high when a celebrity professor encounters racial profiling"

After reading this, I couldn't take the article seriously.

and, he keeps mentioning all of these fines? When we get more expensive social program like universal healthcare, these are only going to increase, because the government is going to need more money.

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