Use a Blanket, Go to Jail : Homeless: A ruling banning sleeping on public property criminalizes poverty and does nothing to solve the problem.

The California state Supreme Court has ruled that the city of Santa Ana had the constitutional authority to arrest people who use a sleeping bag or blanket to sleep on public property. The offense can land a homeless person in jail for up to six months.

One place this decision will push the homeless is toward communities that do not criminalize people who must sleep on the streets at night. This will bring pressure on those cities to enact their own ordinances against the homeless.

Another place it will push them is onto private property. Unauthorized use of someone else’s property has always been illegal, so this also will put them into jail.

Another place it will push the homeless is into hiding. The homeless will go to those areas where they are least seen and the least harassed. Pushed further to the margins, they will be harder to reach.

The place it will push the homeless for sure is jail. Already the L.A. County jail system serves as the largest shelter for the homeless mentally ill in the state.

Housing a person in jail costs at least twice as much as putting someone into a community mental-health facility, half-way house, drug rehabilitation project or a job training program. The criminal justice system is the least cost-effective way to address these social problems and it does nothing to solve the problems that got these people into their predicament.

But here’s the most ironic result: While cities can now jail people who have no place to sleep at night, these cities are legally constrained, except in the most extreme circumstances, from putting someone who is mentally ill into a hospital.

This ruling criminalizes extreme poverty. It criminalizes the mental illness that leaves almost half of the homeless nowhere to go but on the street. So the disheveled, disoriented people who stand all day in front of your neighborhood coffee joint talking to themselves and staring at the pavement will still be there. But if they lie down with a blanket, it’s jail time.