Columbia, South Carolina Criminalizes Homelessness In Unanimous Vote

America, the gracious, friendly Southerners of the Christian land of the free!

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/22/columbia-south-carolina-criminalizes-homelessness_n_3795397.html?ir=Impact

The Huffington Post | By Eleanor Goldberg
Posted: 08/22/2013

City council members in Columbia, S.C., recently voted unanimously to criminalize homelessness.

Concerned that Columbia has become a “magnet for homeless people,” and that businesses and the area’s safety are suffering as a result, council members agreed on Aug. 14 to give people on the streets the option to either relocate, or get arrested, according to the city’s “Emergency Homeless Response” report.

Cooperative homeless people will be given the option to go to a remote 240-person bed emergency shelter, which will be open from September to March. The shelter will also be used as a drop-off for people recently released from prison and jail, too.

A hotline will be set up for passersby to “report” a homeless person that needs to be removed, additional police will be dispensed to monitor the streets and vans will escort the homeless to the shelter.

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there are an estimated 1,621 homeless people living in Columbia and the surrounding area, 25 percent of whom are members of families with children, a figure that could overwhelm the designated shelter.

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According to ThinkProgress, clients at the shelter will not be allowed to leave the premises without permission and a police officer will stand guard at the road leading to the building.

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But a number of other cities have taken such punitive measures as of late.

Just last month, Tampa Bay, Fla., passed an ordinance, which will allow police to arrest people sleeping on the streets and put them behind bars.

There, many argued that such a measure both punishes the taxpayers and the homelessness.

"It costs roughly $50 a day to incarcerate one homeless person for one day. And during the last homeless count that took place, we had 356 homeless people in jail," Amanda Mole, editor of the Tampa Epoch, told HuffPost Live. "With those numbers we spent about 6.6 million dollars a year in Hillsborough County alone just on incarcerating the homeless."

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