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IMPORTANT ISSUES! THESE ARE NOT SOLICITATIONS

LOUISIANA FAILURES! This is so BARBARIC, shared to INFORM and EDUCATE! 

LOUISIANA stands alone in its FAILURES! 

WE ARE ONE NATION! 

AS SUCH, WE EACH HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO SPEAK OUT AGAINST BLATANT RASISM, WHITE SUPREMACY AND THE LONG TERM FAILURES OF ABUSE AND CORRUPTION THAT HAVE DENIED OUR FELLOW AMERICANS THEIR RIGHTS!

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  US NEWS
  

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.”

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.

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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.”

COMMON DREAMS

                CICERO INSTITUTE? 

                ALWAYS KOCH BACKED? 

                KOCH park their GAZILLIONS offshore, does NOTHING for the good of                             ANYONE! 

                READ DARK MONEY BY JANE MAYER available at your public library....all                         about  GREED  & uniting the WEALTHY ANONYMOUS 1% to rape & destroy                     the environment as if it doesn't matter to their legacy.

                 It doesn't benefit DEMOCRACY, Americans or the ENVIRONMENT!   

                 KOCH generously funded opposition to WIND TURBINES off CAPE COD to                     protect their DIRTY ENERGY INVESTMENTS & promoted their DIRTY                                 ENERGY POLLUTION.

                 Do we want to live in a KOCH WORLD lacking humanity & solutions?

'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.

"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."

An unhoused man reacts as he is forced to dismantle his possessions by the New York City Department of Sanitation and police officers as part of a city sweep of encampments on June 23, 2022.

 (Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)

COMMON DREAMS