No one expects the federal judiciary to solve the nation’s worsening homelessness crisis: For better or worse, the U.S. Constitution does not guarantee any kind of fundamental right to shelter. The only question at issue in Grants Pass v. Johnson, which the Supreme Court heard on Monday, is how the government can punish people who lack housing. Since 2018, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has held that the Constitution prohibits the prosecution of indigent people who sleep in public places when there is no available shelter space. Grants Pass gives the Supreme Court an opportunity to overturn that rule—and, in the process, roll back long-standing limitations on cruel and unusual punishment. A majority of the court sounds inclined to do so, based in part on a suspicion that the 9th Circuit is somehow exacerbating homelessness. Let’s be clear: It isn’t. And abolishing the 9th Circuit’s narrow rule will do nothing to help people who lack housing or the communities in which they reside.

Grants Pass is a town in southwestern Oregon with about 40,000 residents, several hundred of whom lack permanent housing and sleep in public parks. In recent years, the City Council has attempted to drive these people out by enacting a series of ordinances that forbid them from sleeping or resting anywhere on public property. Violators are first fined, then jailed for 30 days per offense (which can pile up in mere hours). There’s no homeless shelter for adults in Grants Pass, just a religious “transitional housing” program that compels participants to work full-time without pay, forces them to attend religious services, openly discriminates against disabled people, and limits stays to one month. The town council’s president even stated that the purpose of its new laws was to make homeless people “uncomfortable enough” to leave the town. Law enforcement aggressively enforced the bans until the 9th Circuit found them unconstitutional in 2022.

The appeals court’s decision was rooted in a 1962 Supreme Court case called Robinson v. California. In Robinson, the high court struck down a California law that criminalized addiction to narcotics. The disease of addiction, the majority reasoned, constituted a “status” that the government may not penalize under the Eighth and 14th Amendments, which proscribe states from imposing “cruel and unusual punishments.” The act of using narcotics could, of course, be prosecuted, but a person’s mere condition as a drug addict could not.

Based on this precedent,........

© Slate