Research Is Making Homelessness a Crime, Moral? (Essay Sample)

Is Making Homelessness a Crime, Moral?
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Is Making Homelessness A Crime, Moral?
Every day people across the world work hard to have a descent life with at least food on the table and a place to sleep. However, not all can afford that kind of life especially the disabled and abandoned kids who often have no place to sleep or food to eat. As a result, most of these people end up in the streets as beggars purposely to have something to eat. Since they have no owned place to sleep, their only hope is to sleep in the streets in the comfort of each other. Regretfully, these individuals, despite being humans, end up being subjected to a hostile social environment that denies them access to social services such as better hygiene and housing conditions and thus exposes them to hazardous health conditions. In an effort to address this menace, many countries today have come up with strategies aimed at minimizing the number of homeless people through the provision of homes where these people can be offered food to eat and a place to sleep. Others have further formulated laws that criminalize homelessness and as such, anyone found begging on the streets or sleeping in an open place is subjected to the full course of the law. Nonetheless, as more and more nations are coming up with ways of combating this issue, reports indicate a significant growth of homeless people in the streets. The paper seeks to nullify the claim that making homelessness a crime is moral and explore the various reasons why the latter should not be considered a criminal offense.
Homelessness regarded as a vigorous and disturbing fact, thus a need to have proper designs when determining the importance of housing with regard to the infrastructural set up. Much has been observed by the great emphasis through which a great number of homeless individuals are suffering at the expense of poverty and developmental stages of the body (O'Connell 2015). The direction of homelessness for young children and adults is scantily predictable despite the many characteristics showing the uniqueness of all the adolescents and older street-involved individuals that is properly stated at the different stages of adolescent which individuals regard as the most crucial part of an individual’s being. Despite the fact that some individuals who are in the streets ought not to be there especially since they have the ability and energy to work and earn a descent life, most of these people are forced to the streets unwillingly and hence, the issue of criminalizing it is rather misplaced and immoral.
Majority of the tasks have an obligation that they should be complete so as to enable proper transition of individuals from one stage of life to the other due to the fact that there are several influences on the issue of successful change of status in terms of self‐sufficiency. One of these is certainly homelessness where young people living in unstable housing are more likely to experience living conditions that can hinder adult development and understanding of residential trajectories of homelessness (Roy, Robert, Fournier, Laverdière, Berbiche & Boivin 2016). Studies whose objectives were to estimate the probability of reaching residential stability over time and to identify predictors of residential stability among homeless young adults indicate that young adults will help formulate better public health interventions related to housing.
The idea of paying focuses on life conditions and social and mental health factors that could predict residential stability in the course of homelessness might have prevented us to identify important background factors such as childhood-related factors which may not be indiscriminate to all street youth (O'Connell 2015). The majority of children have a bright future but their present predicaments often bar them from realizing their dreams. It is therefore under moral jurisdiction for various governments to embrace the reality of inability of most homeless people and as such, provide alternative means for these people, who happen to be part and parcel of the state’s land and population.
According to research, most people end up being homeless due to mental illnesses, involvement in drugs and alcohol, and abuse of other harmful substances. However, disability is the single dominant trait among the homeless and in their conditions, these people are least able to negotiate successfully the labor and housing markets, to use the welfare system, or to obtain support from family, kin, and friends. It is worth noting that disability is in no man’s control and thus, society should embrace the disabled class and accord them the necessary support that would enable them to lead a normal life in accordance to good moral values.
Recent studies indicate a significant and consistent increase in the depth and breadth of homeless individuals. In today’s society, arguably due to a massive increase in population size, there are new populations who are now experiencing homelessness, such as families, youth, immigrants, and refugees (O'Connell 2015). Current economic and war crisis are also some of the reasons that have seemingly forced people to leave their homes for safety reasons. Equally, due to economic factors, some individuals may be unable to afford descent housing and as such, most of these individuals end up finding themselves in rather poor living conditions, some even opt to embrace the street life. Hence, despite the fact that some homeless persons can actually engage in various activities to afford a normal life, some economies, especially those faced with a high rate of unemployment due to lack of jobs, force them to indulge in activities that place them at a risk of being homeless and flooding the streets
The problem of homelessness has developed as a natural disaster and catastrophes, and devastating housing and welfare policies which have not only amplified the problem of homelessness by reducing the availability of affordable housing, but have also brought conflicts over the use of public space (O'Connell 2015). As homelessness continue to become increasingly visible within the urban landscape, the city has been reconfigured to answer the needs of a lifestyle focused on consumption, leisure, and luxury and totally neglected the plight of those who sleep in these streets hungry, and at a risk of losing their lives.
Casualties of economic and political restructuring are seen as living proof of the failure of gentrification strategies within the urban centers, in terms of economic, moral and aesthetics norms. The literature on the criminalization and the penalization of homelessness has focused more on the intersection and the interaction between law and public space to study the rolling out of penal strategies to address the homeless problem by applying unethical means that further add up to the homeless’ plights (Anderson & Collins 2014). In this context, homeless people are cast as ‘‘public enemies’’ that cannot be tolerated in public spaces, and which according to those tasked with state matters, justifies the use of legal enforcement to sanitize public space. They often use the term post-justice city to characterize literature that focuses on the rights of the homeless to access public space (O'Connell 2015). In that literature, access to public space is associated with civil rights, since public space is defined as a democratic resource, facilitating encounters with difference, and the production of inclusionary forms of citizenship.
The increasing regulation of public spaces is associated with the city that has no longer being concerned with social justice but rather with economics, seen in the growing privatization of space that can only be accessed by people who pay for their streets. The literature on the phenomenon of recapturing a lost territory and the post-justice city produces compelling accounts of the process of homeless people; that is, the perception that homeless people are undeserving, dangerous, and disorderly. Hence, these issues have attracted the development, adoption, and implementation of regulations and policies aiming to control homeless people’s activities and their presence in public space.
Present articles engage with the literature on law and public spaces. They presume that law has an impact on, and is shaped by public space, underlining the specific social and historical contexts in which penalization unfolds. As can be argued, the adoption, the implementation, and the enforcement, have been justified by discourses that construct homeless people as disorderly, forgetting that no one would, in his or her normal state of mind, wish to be homeless (Roy, Robert, Fournier, Laverdière, Berbiche & Boivin 2016). Moreover, the alleged ‘‘disorderliness’’ of homeless people in these pieces of legislation not only supports aggressive legislative enforcement, but has also legitimized the recourse to other forms of regulatory strategies to better control disorderly people through legal, administrative, or architectural means.
Most countries have come up with ticketing techniques whose emphasis is only on ticketed individuals who are provided with a shelter or community organization’s address upon receiving a violation ticket. Since ticketed individuals in these databases use the addresses of community organizations geared toward homeless populations, the course can reasonably assume that the affected were homeless when they were ticketed or that they had experienced episodes of homelessness before the ticketing process (O'Connell 2015). However, this methodological strategy too fails to account for non-ticketed individuals who were not using these organizations but could still be considered as homeless, or for ticketed individuals who used an ...