I am definitely not a lawyer but I did graduate with a degree in Criminal Justice and I have had some law classes. Or, if you remember the old Holiday Inn Express commercial, I did stay at a Holiday Inn. Anyway, I digress, one of my favorite classes was in constitutional law. Anyhow, the little that I remember from my university days is that the constitution is supposed to expressly prevent the criminalization of status. In other words, being a drug user or an addict is not, in of itself, a crime. So how do the puritanical law makers get around this little wrinkle? They make possession of the substance a crime.
With the most recent ruling by the Supreme Court, it now appears that homelessness can be directly criminalized. The law ticketing, and potentially arresting, people for sleeping outdoors (and thereby being homeless) should have been found to be unconstitutional because said law expressly criminalizes a status. Arrest and incarceration of someone who is homeless does nothing to further help public health or public safety; indeed it does not further these goals. Instead, the law allows for someone who is already down and out to then have a criminal record thereby doubling or tripling the difficulty of getting out of poverty.
The United States is a country hell bent on puritanical punishment for even the slightest of transgressions. Part of the reason for this is the underlying authoritarian White Christian Nationalism and another is the Private Prison lobby. Yes, simply following the money trail can often explain the reasons for criminalization. By criminalizing homelessness, Corrections Corporation of America stands to make even more money through prisons that will become full to the point of overcrowding.
Now that a new legal precedent has been set that effectively criminalizes a person’s status, how long until we see drug use itself criminalized and not simply possession? How long until the government goes after people like myself with mental illness? The Supreme Court has set a dangerous precedent for further reduction of whatever freedoms we may have from incursion by the state.