Hunger, Homelessness and Poverty Task Force writes “ARE PUBLIC LIBRARIES CRIMINALIZING POOR PEOPLE?
In the wake of recent news reports, the Hunger, Homelessness & Poverty Task Force wishes to express concern about public libraries adopting punitive policies clearly targeted at homeless people.
“Odor policies” of the sort enacted by San Luis Obispo County, California, and the “civility campaign” launched by Salt Lake City Library to “teach the homeless, children and others how to behave” (Deseret Morning News, 3/9/05) are at best misguided and at worst contribute to the criminalization of poor people.
Libraries are now participating in a deliberate process that geographer Don Mitchell calls “the annihilation of space by law”
(The complete document is available online at http://www.hhptf.org/)”
Public places != lawless places
Public places do not equal lawless places. Salt Lake City’s Policy cites such rules as “no soliciting or panhandling” and “no sleeping” and “be aware of personal hygiene.”
Last I checked, you couldn’t solicit or panhandle or sleep at the mayor’s office. Perhaps they shouldn’t have targeted children, homeless and then the ever so vague category of others. Perhaps it shouldn’t have targeted at all. But I don’t think their rules are terribly unreasonable for any group of people to follow.
Yes, the poor and homeless have a right to be in public places, but so does everyone else. Hence the term “public”. And if someone’s behavior, whether it be the way they act or the way they smell, is keeping others from enjoying the library, then they need to be redirected and asked to leave until the situation is remedied. We have plenty of patrons who act inappropriately and smell oddly who aren’t poverty stricken. And they are treated much the same way as we would someone who is… We ask them to please stop the offending behavior. If they can not, they need to leave.
Rules are necessary. Without them, society… not just the library… becomes a free for all.
Rules Built on False Premise(s) …
With respect to the previous comment about the need for rules
In his article “Homelessness and Community,” published in the University of Toronto Law Journal (Autumn 2000), Jeremy Waldron writes the following:
“[S]ince a conscious political decision has been made not to provide [adequate public lavatories] … then it is surely a bit much for those who have failed to offer even this modicom of social provision to the homeless to complain about the consequent smell and to treat that as grounds for offering the homeless further indignities and restrictions …
“[I]n a society where there are large numbers of homeless people … public spaces have to be regulated in light of the recognition that some people have no private space–not even the temporary privacy that public shelters or public toilets would afford–to come out of or to return to. Fairness demands that public spaces be regulated in light of the recognition that large numbers of people have no alternative but to be and remain and live all their lives in public. For such persons, there is an unavoidable failure of the complementarity between the use of private space and the use of public space, and unless we are prepared to embrace the most egregious unfairness in the way our community polices itself in public, we are simply not in a position to use that complementarity as a basis for regulation.”