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criminalization of poverty
Louisiana Advances One of the Country’s ‘Cruelest’ Anti-Homeless Bills
One homeless advocacy group said the bill, which would require homeless people to perform unpaid labor to pay for involuntary treatment, "evokes debtor’s prisons, convict leasing, and the ugliest day of Jim Crow."
Apr 18, 2026
The Louisiana House of Representatives voted this week to pass what the National Homelessness Law Center says is "one of the cruelest anti-homeless bills in the country."
Like many other anti-homeless bills being advanced around the country following a 2024 Supreme Court decision allowing states and cities to criminalize homelessness, House Bill 211, which passed by a vote of 70-28, makes unauthorized sleeping in public spaces a crime.
It is punishable by a fine of up to $500, imprisonment for up to six months, or both. Repeat offenders could face one to two years in prison with hard labor and a $1,000 fine.
The bill, which will now advance to the GOP-controlled state Senate, has been nicknamed the "Streets to Success Act" because, according to its sponsor, state Rep. Debbie Villio (R-79), the goal is not to jail homeless people but to "connect them to service providers."
Those who are convicted of sleeping outdoors could be given the option to avoid jail time by instead entering into a mandatory treatment program for at least 12 months. The bill authorizes local governments to set up semi-permanent camps in remote areas, where defendants would be required to stay and receive treatment.
The bill requires homeless defendants to pay “all or part of the cost of the treatment program to which he is assigned," a steep cost for many, as the average cost for residential drug and alcohol rehab treatment in Louisiana is more than $4,400 per week, according to the addiction referral service directory Addicted.org.
According to the bill, those who cannot afford this steep cost would be required to perform unpaid labor for the state or a local community center in lieu of payment.
Bill Quigley, director of the Gillis Long Poverty Law Center at Loyola University New Orleans, called the bill's entire premise "a farce."
"If people had the resources to pay for housing and physical and/or mental health services, they would not be on the street," he told Common Dreams.
He described it as a "cruel theater of the absurd" based on "the lie that people choose to be homeless." The law, he said, "assumes our communities have plenty of affordable apartments and lots of mental and physical health services available."
In reality, he said, these services are chronically underfunded, and the city would need to build about 55,000 more affordable rental units to provide enough housing for its rent-burdened population.
Though it is not uncommon for homeless people to struggle with mental health or substance use issues, increases in the cost of housing have been shown to have a direct relationship with increasing homelessness.
Homelessness in New Orleans dropped considerably in the years following the Covid-19 pandemic, when Congress provided permanent housing subsidies for those in need. But after those funds have dried up, homelessness in the city shot up higher than before the pandemic, a study by the homelessness nonprofit UNITY of Greater New Orleans found in 2024.
New Orleans City Councilmember Lesli Harris (D), who has opposed the bill, pointed to the success of the city's Home for Good program, which took a "Housing First" approach to homelessness, providing rental subsidies and allowing people to move straight from encampments into housing without requirements that they obtain treatment.
According to a May 2025 report, the program had moved 1,133 people off the streets and into supportive housing and allowed eight homeless encampments to close.
"Through our Home for Good program, we house an individual for roughly $21,844 per year. By comparison, jailing that same person costs an average of $51,000—and failing to act at all can cost up to $55,000 in emergency room visits and crisis rehousing," Harris said. "HB 211 would steer Louisiana toward the most expensive option while producing no lasting housing, no services, and no real path forward for the people involved."
Harris has also decried the bill's creation of what she called "internment camps" for treatment. The bill's text requires these facilities to be far away from downtown and other high-value neighborhoods, which she said separates those trying to rebuild their lives from work, public transit, and other critical services, and further isolates them from society.
Since the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which allowed cities to enforce public-camping bans against unhoused people even when shelter is unavailable, around two dozen states and hundreds of municipalities have passed various measures criminalizing poverty.
The homeless advocacy group Housing Not Handcuffs points out that many of the bills were written by the Cicero Institute, a far-right think tank with heavy backing from billionaire tech investors that now has deep influence over the housing policy of President Donald Trump, who has taken a hacksaw to funding for public housing programs under the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Housing Not Handcuffs said Louisiana's bill, which would almost certainly be signed by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry if passed by the state Senate, "is an extreme take on the already extreme copy-paste legislation" peddled by Cicero.
"This bill forces homeless people charged with a crime to make the false choice between jail or at least one year of forced treatment," the group said. "Louisiana has a long history—and present—of chain gangs, prison labor, and entrenched white supremacy. This bill clearly evokes debtor’s prisons, convict leasing, and the ugliest day of Jim Crow."
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Trump’s New Substance Use Policy Would Have Made My Own Recovery Impossible
My daughter exists because someone gave me a hotel room, a hospital bed, and a second chance. If EO 14321 had been in place, I would have been treated like a criminal, not a patient.
Aug 30, 2025
Last month, US President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14321—“Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets.” By criminalizing homelessness, addiction, and mental health crises, the order strips federal support from lifesaving public health solutions like Housing First and harm reduction—the very policies that saved my life and my daughter’s, and made my nearly three years of recovery possible.
I spent over a decade unhoused in San Francisco. I was already used to instability—much of my childhood was spent living in cars, motels, and campgrounds, until I landed in foster care. They kept placing me in institutions, each more restrictive than the last. I ran away often. The threat of forced placements where abuse was common taught me early to value my freedom. But freedom, without any foundation, can come at the cost of survival. I used substances to manage trauma I had no tools to process. It wasn’t glamorous. I did what I had to do to survive.
By age 29, I was pregnant and living in a makeshift shelter beside the freeway with my partner. A massive storm hit and everything we had was washed away. We were soaked, freezing, and standing in knee-deep water when the city’s Homeless Outreach Team arrived. No judgment. Just one question: “Are you safe where you are right now?” They got us into a hotel that night. That simple act saved my life—and gave me a chance.
With shelter, I was able to schedule a prenatal appointment. When I missed it due to withdrawal symptoms, a public health nurse came to me and helped get me into a hospital bed to safely taper off opioids. I spent the rest of my pregnancy hospitalized due to complications. My daughter was born prematurely and spent two months in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. It was a long road, but we made it. That wouldn’t have been possible under Trump’s executive order.
If Trump chooses cages, we can choose clinics. If he chooses punishment, we can choose prevention. If he chooses fear, we must choose humanity.
EO 14321 eliminates federal support for Housing First policies—programs that provide housing without requiring sobriety. It prioritizes forced institutionalization over voluntary care. It defunds services like naloxone distribution, clean syringes, and mobile health teams that meet people where they are. It punishes cities like San Francisco for offering compassionate, evidence-based care.
After giving birth, I entered treatment, using methadone to taper slowly. I’ve been sober nearly three years. That wouldn’t have happened if I’d been forced to quit cold turkey. The first time I was pregnant, I did exactly that—thinking it was best for the baby. I got violently ill and miscarried. I didn’t know opioid withdrawal could be fatal during pregnancy.
That’s why harm reduction matters. When you’ve used for years, quitting all at once can kill you. I needed time, support, and nonjudgmental care. If someone had tried to force me into abstinence, I would’ve run. The only reason I could stay was because I was met with dignity, not demands.
Harm reduction tools—like clean syringes and naloxone—kept me and my partner alive long enough to heal. Narcan brought us back more than once. These aren’t fringe ideas. They’re public health basics. Without them, I wouldn’t be a mother today.
My daughter is 2 now—chubby, curious, thriving. I still receive medication-assisted treatment, not because I’m still using, but because my tolerance was high after years on the street. My partner is now in the sheet metal union. We have housing. We have hope. But under EO 14321, the very services that helped build this life would have been gone. The care I needed would’ve been criminalized.
Trump’s order doesn’t just shift funding—it reshapes the system around coercion. It calls for expanded civil commitment laws that make forced treatment easier. But science and lived experience say the same thing: Coercion kills, voluntary care heals. I was institutionalized for nearly a year at 16—not because I was violent, but because I was suffering. It didn’t help. It hurt. It made me distrustful and traumatized. If you strip away someone’s autonomy, you strip away their will to recover.
This order tries to legislate suffering. It replaces housing and support with jail cells, locked wards, and abstinence-only programs that don’t work for most people. It replaces hope with fear. But addiction doesn’t respond to punishment. Recovery grows in trust, safety, and connection.
So what does compassion look like in practice? Start with Housing First—always. Fund syringe access and safe-use spaces. Offer medication-assisted treatment without strings attached. Train outreach workers in trauma-informed care. Build trust. Respect autonomy. Celebrate survival instead of punishing it.
San Francisco has already shown it’s possible. Our city is on track to become the first major US city with no new HIV infections—precisely because we invested in harm reduction and met people where they were, without shame. As the federal government rolls back those strategies, we face a choice. Do we follow them down a path of fear and criminalization, or do we lead with evidence, compassion, and courage?
My daughter exists because someone gave me a hotel room, a hospital bed, and a second chance. If EO 14321 had been in place, I would have been treated like a criminal, not a patient. I might not be here. She definitely wouldn’t be. Until a person dies, there is hope. That hope is sacred. It’s not flashy. It takes time. But it works. If Trump chooses cages, we can choose clinics. If he chooses punishment, we can choose prevention. If he chooses fear, we must choose humanity. Let’s not squander the hope we still have.
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Trump’s Plan to Arrest Our Way Out of Homelessness Won’t Work; Just Ask Kentucky
In April 2024, the Kentucky legislature passed HB 5—the bill that paved the way for Kentucky to ticket and arrest people trying to survive outside. Then, homelessness rose 10%.
Aug 03, 2025
Punishing people for being poor doesn’t make them less poor. And jailing someone who’s homeless doesn’t make them housed. But that’s exactly what President Donald Trump’s new executive order does: It makes criminals out of people trying to survive our nation’s housing crisis.
Only affordable housing and accessible healthcare will get people off the streets so they can live a stable life. Instead, Trump’s order calls for local and state governments to ticket and arrest people for living on our streets.
These policies waste taxpayer dollars just to make our homelessness crisis worse. If you need a preview of how Trump’s disastrous order will play out, just look at my home state of Kentucky.
In April 2024, the Kentucky legislature passed HB 5—the bill that paved the way for Kentucky to ticket and arrest people trying to survive outside. These laws, labeled “camping bans,” are popping up across the country. They’re rooted in the myth that people choose to be homeless—and the only way to help is through jail or involuntary commitment.
Not only is this cruel and inhumane. It also doesn’t work.
Instead of distractions and dictatorial decrees rooted in stereotypes and stigma, we need real leadership on real solutions to homelessness, like higher wages, and rents people can afford.
In Louisville earlier this year, a pregnant woman in active labor was ticketed by police because she had no choice but to sleep outside. Law enforcement did not offer her help,
Fortunately, she was able to deliver a healthy baby. But she’s still housing insecure—and now burdened with a citation too. Her story proves that making criminals out of people who have nowhere to go doesn’t reduce suffering—it makes it worse.
So it’s not surprising that even with this new law in place, there was still an over 10% rise in homelessness in Kentucky just last year. Similarly, national rates continue to increase even as more cities and states pass “camping bans.”
I’m the director at VOCAL-KY, a movement of low-income people. I’ve gotten to know the folks living in Louisville’s shelters and on the streets. It’s not hard for me to relate. When I lost my housing, my family and I lived out of my car until we could get back on our feet.
We work day in and day out to support our neighbors who live outside by providing a safe space and connection to services. And the pregnant woman, Samantha, who was cited while in active labor, is now a part of our drop-in center community.
This is what compassion looks like—not citations that put struggling people further in debt or behind bars.
People living on our streets and in our shelters want services and housing, but there isn’t enough to go around. With this executive order, the Trump administration is diverting even more money toward arresting and jailing people—and away from the housing and care that urban, rural, and suburban America all need.
Instead of distractions and dictatorial decrees rooted in stereotypes and stigma, we need real leadership on real solutions to homelessness, like higher wages, and rents people can afford. The reality is most Americans are closer to becoming homeless than becoming billionaires.
But instead of investing in solutions, Trump and the GOP gave massive tax breaks to the ultra rich—including to some of the same people and companies who make billions off driving up rents—while cutting programs for low-income people. In all likelihood, next year we’ll see another record number of Americans in homelessness.
We need federal lawmakers to sign onto the Housing, Not Handcuffs Act and invest in communities by directing federal funds to support local solutions that address the root causes of homelessness, not just force people into jail or detention centers dressed up as treatment.
Trump’s plan to arrest our way out of homelessness won’t work, because it’s never worked. Only housing, care, and services will help people get back on their feet, and we need our policies and politicians to act on those solutions now more than ever.
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A Year After Grants Pass, Criminalizing Homelessness Still Doesn’t Work
Homelessness is solvable in our lifetime if our country commits to ensuring that every person has a safe, affordable, dignified, and permanent place to call home.
Jun 09, 2025
In the largest eviction of a homeless encampment in recent history, around 100 unhoused people were recently forced to vacate Oregon’s Deschutes National Forest—or else face a $5,000 fine and up to one year in jail.
The forest was the last hope for the encampment’s residents, many of whom were living in broken down RVs and cars. Shelters in nearby Bend—where the average home price is nearly $800,000—are at capacity, and rent is increasingly unaffordable.
“There’s nowhere for us to go,” Chris Dake, an encampment resident who worked as a cashier and injured his knee, told The New York Times.
Today, a person who works full-time and earns a minimum wage cannot afford a safe place to live almost anywhere in the country.
This sentiment was echoed by unhoused people in Grants Pass, 200 miles south, where a similar fight unfolded. A year ago this June, in Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court’s billionaire-backed justices ruled that local governments can criminalize people for sleeping outside, even if there’s no available shelter.
Nearly one year later, homelessness—and its criminalization—has only worsened.
Today, a person who works full-time and earns a minimum wage cannot afford a safe place to live almost anywhere in the country. The federal minimum wage has remained stagnant at $7.25 since 2009, and rent is now unaffordable for half of all tenants.
As a result, there are now over 770,000 people without housing nationwide—a record high. Many more are just one emergency away from joining them.
The Supreme Court’s abhorrent decision opened the door for cities to harass people for the “crime” of not having a place to live. Fines and arrests, in turn, make it more difficult to get out of poverty and into stable housing.
Since Grants Pass, around 150 cities have passed or strengthened “anti-camping” laws that fine, ticket, or jail people for living outdoors—including over two dozen cities and counties in California alone. A Florida law mandates that counties and municipalities ban sleeping or camping on public property. Due to a related crackdown, almost half of arrests in Miami Beach last year were of unhoused people.
Emboldened by Grants Pass, localities have ramped up the forced clearing of encampments—a practice known as “sweeps.”
While officials justify them for safety and sanitation reasons, sweeps harm people by severing their ties to case workers, medical care, and other vital services. In many cases, basic survival items are confiscated by authorities. Alongside being deadly, research confirms that sweeps are also costly and unproductive.
Punitive fines, arrests, and sweeps don’t address the root of the problem: the lack of permanent, affordable, and adequate housing.
President Donald Trump is only doubling down on failed housing policies. He ordered over 30 encampments in D.C. to be cleared based on a March executive order. And his budget request for 2026 would slash federal rental assistance for over 10 million Americans by a devastating 43% (all to fund tax breaks for billionaires and corporations.)
For too long, our government policies have allowed a basic necessity for survival to become commodified and controlled by corporations and billionaire investors. We must challenge this if we ever want to resolve homelessness.
Housing is a fundamental human right under international law that the U.S. must recognize. Homelessness is solvable in our lifetime if our country commits to ensuring that every person has a safe, affordable, dignified, and permanent place to call home.
As housing experts have long noted, governments should invest in proven and humane solutions like Housing First, which provides permanent housing without preconditions, coupled with supportive services.
Despite the obstacles, communities continue to fight back—including in Grants Pass, where disability rights advocates are challenging the city’s public camping restrictions. Others are forming tenant and homeless unions in their cities, organizing rent strikes, and pushing for publicly funded housing (or “social housing”) that’s permanently affordable and protected from the private market.
The Grants Pass decision may have opened the door to new cruelties, but local governments still have a choice to do what’s right. Now, more than ever, we must demand real housing solutions.
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'Unfathomably Cruel': Billionaire-Backed Justices Rule in Favor of Criminalizing Homelessness
"Maybe the right-wing justices could empathize with the most vulnerable Americans if they spent less time jet-setting on luxury vacations on their wealthy benefactors' dime," said one critic.
Jun 28, 2024
"SCOTUS just criminalized homelessness."
So said numerous legal experts and advocates for the unhoused Friday after the U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority ruled that local governments can enforce bans on sleeping outdoors, regardless of whether municipalities are able to offer them shelter space.
In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the justices ruled in City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson that officials can criminalize sleeping and camping on public property including parks, even when housing options are unavailable or unaffordable.
"We are disappointed that a majority of the court has decided that our Constitution allows a city to punish its homeless residents simply for sleeping outside with a blanket to survive the cold when there is nowhere else for them to go," said Ed Johnson, director of litigation at the Oregon Law Center, which represented unhoused Grants Pass residents in the case.
The decision overturned a ruling by the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that found bans on outdoor sleeping violated the 8th Amendment's proscription of cruel and unusual punishment.
"Homelessness is complex. Its causes are many. So may be the public policy responses required to address it," Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority. "A handful of federal judges cannot begin to 'match' the collective wisdom the American people possess in deciding 'how best to handle' a pressing social question like homelessness."
Gorsuch suggested that unhoused people could invoke "necessity... insanity, diminished-capacity, and duress defenses" when they are prosecuted for poverty-related offenses.
In a dissent calling the criminalization of unhoused people "unconscionable and unconstitutional," Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that "sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime."
"For some people, sleeping outside is their only option," she noted.
Sotomayor continued:
Homelessness is a reality for too many Americans. On any given night, over half a million people across the country lack a fixed, regular, and adequate nighttime residence. Many do not have access to shelters and are left to sleep in cars, sidewalks, parks, and other public places. They experience homelessness due to complex and interconnected issues, including crippling debt and stagnant wages; domestic and sexual abuse; physical and psychiatric disabilities; and rising housing costs coupled with declining affordable housing options.
"It is possible to acknowledge and balance the issues facing local governments, the humanity and dignity of homeless people, and our constitutional principles," Sotomayor asserted. "Instead, the majority focuses almost exclusively on the needs of local governments and leaves the most vulnerable in our society with an impossible choice: Either stay awake or be arrested."
"The Constitution provides a baseline of rights for all Americans rich and poor, housed and unhoused," Sotomayor added. "This court must safeguard those rights even when, and perhaps especially when, doing so is uncomfortable or unpopular."
Attorney Theane Evangelis, who represented Grants Pass in the case, cheered the decision, arguing that the 9th Circuit ruling had "tied the hands of local governments."
Some leaders in places where the homelessness crisis is most acute welcomed Friday's ruling, including Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who filed an amicus brief in the case, and London Breed, the Democratic mayor of San Francisco, which also filed an amicus brief.
"Gorsuch extensively cites San Francisco's amicus in the decision,"
noted Raya Steier, a San Francisco-based attorney who led the successful campaign to pass a local ballot measure taxing the wealthy to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for Covid rent relief and affordable housing. "Congratulations London Breed and David Chiu, this is now your legacy."
Economic justice advocates said rising inequality and housing costs have played a key role in driving the U.S. unhoused population to a record 650,000. If all the unhoused people in the country came together to form a city, it would be the nation's 23rd-largest—ahead of Las Vegas, Boston, Detroit, and Portland, Oregon—based on 2020 Census figures.
"We are in the midst of a crisis where housing is unaffordable for millions of Americans. Millions of us are just one paycheck away from losing our homes," New York-based Center for Popular Democracy Action said in a statement. "Today, the Supreme Court has made the morally bankrupt decision to allow people experiencing homelessness to be persecuted and punished just for existing, while denying them shelter and safety as a human right."
"For those who are unhoused, this will mean fines, tickets, and even incarceration for a vulnerable community already abandoned by city and state authorities," the group added.
Referring to the high court's 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling, many social media users said that "corporations are people" but "the homeless are not."
Others pointed to the millions of dollars worth of gifts and other perks—many of them undisclosed—lavished upon Supreme Court members, especially far-right Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, by right-wing billionaires, some with business before the court.
"Today's decision shows how little the MAGA supermajority cares about struggling Americans," said Tracy Adair, communications manager at Stand Up America, a New York-based pro-democracy group. "It is unfathomably cruel to punish unhoused individuals for existing on public property when they have nowhere else to go."
"Maybe the right-wing justices could empathize with the most vulnerable Americans if they spent less time jet-setting on luxury vacations on their wealthy benefactors' dime," Adair added.
Advocates for the unhoused stressed that the solution to homelessness is housing, not criminalization.
"Cities should not punish people for being poor," said Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness, a housing justice and human rights group serving San Francisco. "The solution is, and has always been, safe and affordable housing."
In response to the ruling, the National Homelessness Law Center is calling on the Biden administration to invest at least $356 billion next year to fund universal rental assistance, upgraded public housing, a national housing trust fund, eviction and homelessness prevention programs, and voluntary supportive and emergency services.
"America is the richest country in the world. We can afford to ensure that everybody has a roof over their heads, a warm bed, and a door to lock," the group sad. "Our neighbors living outside cannot wait any longer."
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End All Youth Detention and Torture at Rikers Island Now
Jun 14, 2015
Solitary confinement is pretty horrible for anybody, but it's especially horrible for a child. It is psychological torture.
-- Bryan Stevenson, Founder and Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, author of Just Mercy
When you go over the three years that he spent [in jail] and all the horrific details he endured, it's unbelievable that this could happen to a teenager in New York City. He didn't get tortured in some prison camp in another country. It was right here!
-- Paul V. Prestia, Kalief Browder's lawyer to The New Yorker
Before I went to jail, I didn't know about a lot of stuff, and, now that I'm aware, I'm paranoid. I feel like I was robbed of my happiness.
-- Kalief Browder to Jennifer Gonnerman, staff writer for The New Yorker
Nobody of any age should be held in jail without a trial for three years. No child or adolescent should be held in an adult jail. No child or youth should be housed in facilities where those entrusted to care for them violently assault them. Yet, a 16-year-old accused of stealing a backpack was kept in one of the most violent adult jails in the United States, Rikers Island in New York City, for three years without a trial. This was morally scandalous and inhumane. Even worse, he spent more than two years of that time in solitary confinement, locked up alone except to go to the shower, the recreation area, the visit room or the medical clinic. This was torture. The suicide of 22-year-old Kalief Browder on June 6, barely two years after his release and return home, was the final horror in his tragic and brutal journey into the depths of the adult criminal justice system in New York City and state.
At Rikers, Kalief was cruelly beaten by juvenile gangs, and beaten by a guard as he was calmly walking from solitary confinement to the shower. This violent abuse was caught on video and made public in April by an investigative reporter from The New Yorker. Other alleged abuses were not: The cruel guards who denied him meals, medical care, trips to the shower and extended his time in solitary confinement by making up disciplinary problems.
It should surprise no one that a teenager subjected to this continuous torture; a teenager who maintained his innocence and just wanted his right to a day in court to prove it; a teenager who turned down plea deals repeatedly although it would have meant he could go home immediately; a teenager with no history of mental illness before Rikers Island tried to commit suicide while held in solitary confinement for two of his three years there. It is beyond shameful that he was held without a trial, without being proven guilty and because he was a poor young Black male. This travesty was and is preventable and must be prevented for all youths at risk of such abuse.
If New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and state legislators act immediately before this state legislative session ends June 17, 2015 to raise the age of criminal responsibility, as 48 states have done, more tragedies and suffering like Kalief Browder's might be avoided. And youths still at Rikers might have reduced suffering and pain.
Kalief Browder's cruel and unjust treatment began May 15, 2010, when he was picked up with a friend in the Bronx. He shared his story later with a reporter from The New Yorker to make sure this would never happen to anyone else. Kalief was stopped for allegedly stealing a backpack earlier that evening. According to the report, he maintained his innocence and offered to let the police search his pockets. The only evidence against him was the testimony of the alleged victim he never got the chance to confront. Eyewitness identification is notoriously unreliable.
Kalief Browder was immediately funneled into the adult criminal justice system because of the unjust lottery of geography and poverty. New York remains one of only two states in our country that still automatically treats 16- and 17-year-olds as adults. More than a century ago, states began to legislate that children should be treated as children to prevent the inhumane, dangerous, and ineffective practice of putting them in adult jails. New York and North Carolina should end this practice immediately. Not one more young life should be ruined or tragically lost to Rikers preventable torture and violence.
We have long known that putting children in adult jails puts them in harm's way. The Children's Defense Fund (CDF) first documented and began advocating for changes to end these harms nearly 40 years ago after visiting 500 jails across America and publishing in 1976 our deeply disturbing findings in a report on Children in Adult Jails. We found children incarcerated with adults suffered increased rates of physical abuse, like Kalief did. Today they are 36 times more likely to commit suicide than those in juvenile facilities. In light of this evidence, it is outrageous that any state today would subject its teenagers to any adult jail especially like Rikers Island whose culture of violence is notorious. New York must stop right now.
The unjust criminalization of the poor is another reason Kalief Browder ended up at Rikers Island. His family could not afford to hire an attorney or pay the $3,000 bail to keep him home to await a trial that never took place over three long years. Being poor, Black and male, the odds were high that he would end up in the Cradle to Prison PipelineTM and suffer preventable death.
Dr. Sean Joe, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development at the Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis, and an authority on suicidal behavior among African American males, says that among Black Americans, Black males between the ages of 15 to 24 are most likely to commit suicide. "The suicide of Kalief Browder highlights the glaring gap between the alarming psychiatric needs of black boys and men and the absence of effective treatments; a justice system that enacted psychological torture because a putative stolen backpack mattered more than the life and future of a black teen; and the importance to address the unattended psychological consequences resulting from the feverous adjudication, prosecution, and sentencing of black boys and men without regard for their mental health."
More than a thousand days after arriving at Rikers Island, Kalief Browder was abruptly released four days after his 20th birthday. He had spent most of the 17 previous months in solitary confinement. The charges against him were dismissed. It is unclear when the only evidence against him disappeared, and when and if the "victim" had returned to Mexico and could no longer be found. Two years later, after more suicide attempts and mental health hospitalizations, Kalief Browder took his life at home. He was 22-years-old.
His tragically short life has already made a difference. Mayor Bill de Blasio led New York City to ban solitary confinement for all juveniles when he heard Kalief's story. But the Governor and state legislature without another moment's delay must also take action on the age at which children can be placed in adult jails as the Governor's Commission on Youth, Public Safety and Justice recommended. No other child or youth should be at risk of Kalief Browder's fate and our nation needs to change the way we treat Black boys and men and recognize that all lives matter equally.
Albert Camus, the great French Nobel Literature Laureate, speaking at a Dominican Monastery in 1948 said: "Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children." He described our responsibility as human beings "if not to reduce evil, at least not to add to it" and "to refuse to consent to conditions which torture innocents." "I continue," he said "to struggle against this universe in which children suffer and die." And so must every one of us including our elected officials who must be held accountable. Only then will the cries of the prophets for justice and peace and America's pretentions to be a just nation become a lasting reality.
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