The Criminalization of Homelessness and Poverty:

From an international, national and local perspective, the Task Force will collaborate with the National Coalition for the Homeless, Habitat International Coalition and others to bring the stories of people who have experienced the loss of their civil and human rights on the streets of Atlanta and elsewhere. The session will also address remedies to the stopping and/or arresting people without probable cause of a crime. Hate crimes perpetrated against homeless people have become common and are being documented in a national databse maintained by NCH. Litigation that has succeeded in eliminating criminalizing ordinances and statutes will be presented and shared as precedents to be used in furter litigation. Case studies of abuses and remedies will be presented and shared. People who are currently homeless will share their stories and their research as well as any successes experienced in direct action and organizing.

Because people without their own homes are vulnerable to undue scrutiny, often passionate prejudice, nearly universal profiing and finally arrest, we expect participants to learn from each other and from the presentations made by homeless people. We expect that they will share information fro joining networks already working on their issues. We expect that we will discover additional resources among participants that can be shared as w go forward. We will also discover commonalities in our plights and in our work that will transcend this four-day experience.

The biggest challenge for eliminating and preventing this criminalization is the difficulty in bringing fearful policy makers and private citizens into directo contact with the people against whom they discriminate or against whom they tolerate discrimination. Education and public awareness do not produce the same results as one-to-one contact. We propose spreading the work of the Task Force and NCH in developing Speakers' Bureaus of people who have experienced homelessness to go to faith communities, schools, colleges and private business networking events to address this challenge directly.