Grants Pass, Oregon, population 39,000, has passed three ordinances since 2017 to prohibit “sleeping on public sidewalks, streets, or alleyways,” and prohibit camping on “sidewalks, streets, alleys, lanes, public rights of way, parks, benches, or other publicly-owned property or under bridges or viaducts.” According to University of Mississippi law professor William W. Berry III, violation of these mandates can lead to a fine of $295 for the first offense; this escalates to $537.60 if unpaid. The law further allows the city to ban “offenders” from local parks for 30 days and arrest or incarcerate repeat offenders.
Not surprisingly, unhoused people in Grants Pass were appalled by these policies and, in October 2018, three impacted individuals — Gloria Johnson, Debra Lee Blake (who died in 2021) and John Logan — filed suit, charging that the policies were a violation of Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment. For the next six years, the case wound its way through lower courts before ending up before the U.S. Supreme Court earlier this week.
According to official government estimates, there are approximately 600 unhoused people in Grants Pass, with another 1,000 individuals living so precariously that they are at risk of imminent eviction. What’s more, the city’s indoor shelter options are few and far between. The largest, the Grants Pass Gospel Rescue Mission, runs the Fikso Family Center which can accommodate fewer than 100 people and requires residents to obey 29 rules, including abstaining from alcohol and drugs, and “dressing and behaving according to birth gender.” Attendance at religious services is mandatory.
A 13-bed “safe house” for female survivors of interpersonal violence and a four-bed shelter for adolescents between the ages of 18 and 21 are the only other shelter options.
The right-wing Cicero Institute is behind policies like those promulgated in Grants Pass as well as a recent spate of laws criminalizing the unhoused. According to the group, when unhoused people create encampments, sleep on the streets or lie down in public parks or on sidewalks, they pose an enormous danger to the health and safety of communities. But that “danger,” the institute says, can be mitigated through legislation, and its staff have created model bills for states and cities to use in crafting policies to criminalize these activities.
The proposed statutes offer a prototype for directing money away from Housing First programs that provide shelter to the unhoused without requiring them to stop drinking or using drugs, get medical or psychiatric treatment, or apply for welfare or other public benefits. In addition, the model bills provide language to enable lawmakers to amend civil commitment laws to make it easier to hospitalize or incarcerate someone deemed by law enforcers to be mentally ill or dangerous. Lastly, the model legislation sets up funding streams to establish short-term shelters and policed encampments that are located in remote, little-trafficked areas.
Although the Cicero Institute is a largely behind-the-scenes outfit, it has had remarkable success since its founding by........