Lady Law and Homeless Encampments

"We need more shelter, we need more beds, and we need more mental health inpatient treatment."

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Sarah and David discuss oral arguments in Grants Pass v. Johnson, a Supreme Court case addressing the issue of homeless people camping on public property, as well as and the 4th Circuit ruling that blocked West Virginia’s law blocking transgender athletes from participating in sports.

The Agenda:
—SCOTUS hears Grants Pass v. Johnson
—Necessity defense and cannibalism
—4th Circuit ruling on trans sports ban in West Virginia
—SCOTUS rules on Title VII case
—Biden expands Title IX ruling
—Campus due process and Columbia protesters

Show Notes:
—Casey Mattox on local governments stopping churches from helping the homeless

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Comments (201)
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  1. Roy Peled

    A stupid question, but still - when someone is arrested for camping outside homeless, isn't that like offering them a bed for the night? (an awful policy solution becuase shelter beds are a much cheaper and more manageable option, but just asking)

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  2. Dagies

    Child of the 70's. Rotary phones the whole way! But we did have microwave in the latter part of the decade after my electrical engineer brother helped Litton design the super-cool new touch panel controls 😄

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    Jill

    Did I hear correctly that at the end of the Pod Sara just casually dropped the fact that she didn’t have a refrigerator growing up? Just an ice box? Like that was totally normal????

    Forget about rotary phones (which I think we’ve established were around well into the eighties), did I just grow up oblivious to the fact that people still had ICEBOXES in TEXAS well into the 80s and maybe 90s?

    David…please don’t let her give you grief over phones when she casually throws out this kind of information! (Please let me know if she was kidding and it just went over my head. Perhaps I wasn’t listening closely enough)

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  4. Emhanvey

    Good morning Sarah and David. I listened this week to your Lady Law podcast and wanted to add my own thoughts to the problem of homelessness and mental illness. I am a social worker, not a lawyer, so often parts of your podcast go over my head. But I am here to comment on my area of specialty, mental illness. In your discussion of homelessness David stated several times the need for more inpatient hospitals for the mentally ill. I am going to argue that is not the greatest need. I am a clinical supervisor at Macomb County Community Mental Health, in the state of Michigan. Our target population is the severely and persistently mentally ill (SPMI). Often the individuals we serve struggle with chronic homelessness, and criminal involvement. We oversee the mental health court, and jail diversion programs. We provide intensive case management, out patient therapy, both general and specialized programs. We provide psychiatric treatment. We provide substance abuse treatment and treatment for those with co-occurring disorders. To be hospitalized you need to meet strict “401 criteria,” a danger to yourself and/or others. Hospitalization does not solve problems, it is crisis intervention. We do have a shortage of long term hospital settings, state hospitals, and I would support their expansion. But that is not the biggest issue. What we need is funding to expand the community Mental health services and people to provide those services. We also need more residential options, There are 3 shelters in Macomb County, and it’s hard to get into because they are almost always full. We have 2 crisis residential homes. We need more subsidized housing and group homes. There are barriers for individuals with criminal backgrounds to get into subsidized housing because they can’t pass a background check. They also reject people with poor credit. It’s really hard to have good credit if your monthly income is under $1000/month. Many have no income. In our assessment and referral department we average 100 intakes a week. It can take up to 3 months to get these individuals linked with an ongoing provider. My case managers have caseloads of 50-60 people. We have a shortage of contract providers to send people to. We keep the most severe in our direct programs. Even if we had more funding to expand our programming, obtaining and keeping competent staff is an ongoing challenge. I currently supervise 10 staff, and my team is excellent. They are hard working and cohesive. We just cannot meet the needs of the community and the constant pressure to take more individuals, though we do take individuals every week. We have three direct clinics, and a number of clinics we contract with. But 100 people getting intakes per week for a year is 5,200, and we can’t accommodate them all. It’s definitely a problem, and I am glad that David made the connection between homelessness and mental illness. However, if we have better and expanded community mental health services, we won’t need as many inpatient hospital programs.

    And…I think I’m a year older than David, born in 1968. I grew up with rotary phones. We didn’t have push button phones until high school, and I never had one in my house. When I was real young, some of my friends had party lines, where you share your phone line with a neighbor or two. We never had a party line. I guess we were fortunate.

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    WBrisky

    On the homeless, it is certainly a very hard, complicated policy question to be decided by the political branches, not something decided by Nine Wise Guardians.

    But I think there is a place between locking up spouses in contested divorces or anybody who acts funny, and simply leaving the mentally ill or addicted of our society to live on the streets. The legal standard is "danger to self, danger to others." Anyone homeless because of addiction or mental illness almost by definition is a danger to himself, and needs help. A compassionate society should take care of them, not let them languish on the streets. Surely we can design a system where the legal standard can be interpreted more broadly as I have suggested, but where it cannot be abused. Many of the mentally ill or addicted homeless end up in jail anyway, and get no treatment.

    I am old enough to remember the times when there were State Hospitals to take care of these people. They can be fed and housed, treated, and provided the right medications. State Hospitals can be made decent places, and some were. Of course, that will be substantially more expensive than building shelter beds, but better for both society and those suffering from mental illness or addiction.

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    WBrisky

    Sarah, I think you have it wrong on "trans-gender" bathrooms. Remember that nothing can ever change a male into a female, or vice versa. So to call a "trans-woman" a woman or a "she" is simply to tell a lie. Whatever "gender" is, it is not sex.

    Bostock expressly reserved the questions of bathrooms, locker rooms and sports. Bostock can be explained, and distinguished from both sports and bathrooms not on the basis of biology - which clearly would apply across the board since a "trans-woman" is always a man, but on the basis of whether the rights of others, whether biological rights or cultural rights, are violated. No one is being harmed by seeing a man in women's clothes. But forcing women to compete against men in sports does. Similarly, forcing women to be in intimate spaces with men hurts those women. The fact that the harm is cultural is irrelevant. It is still harm. To argue that "trans-women" should be allowed into such spaces because modesty is not protected would mean that any rule separating women's and men's restrooms or locker rooms would be illegal. I had this very case, taking the position of the dissent, and lost in the Appellate Court. Unfortunately although the state Supreme Court accepted the case, it settled before I could get there.

    The more interesting question is whether the government can force someone to acknowledge a lie. For example, can a public college force a professor to call a "trans-woman" student by "she" thus forcing the professor to acknowledge a falsehood as true?

    This reminds me of King Knut explaining that his power was limited by commanding the tide to stop. The government can pass a law saying a "trans-woman" is a woman, but that will not make it so. It also reminds me of the fable of the Emperor's New Clothes. Everyone on the Left closes their eyes and pretends a "trans-woman" is really a woman and it is only those of us who say, wait, come back to reality, who are still grounded in fact.

    That is not to say that I have no compassion for those who suffer from gender dysphoria. But what they need is not hormones and surgery (which only entrenches their delusion), but good mental health care to help them feel comfortable in their own bodies and give up their delusion. You would not hand control of the French army to the guy who thinks he is Napoleon. No responsible surgeon would hack off a perfectly healthy arm just because the patient thought it didn't belong there. Neither should care for someone suffering from gender dysphoria involve roping the rest of society into the delusion.

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  7. Jennifer Searcy

    Microwave popcorn is g-a-r-b-a-g-e. The proper way to prepare popcorn is on the stove, in oil. My mother is the Julia Child of popcorn... oil a certain temp, add a few test kernels and wait for them to pop, add rest of kernels, turn down heat and vent when the popping gets a 'goin. In my home growing up, popcorn was a legit dinner entree, seasoned with salt obviously and usually accompanied by a side of sliced apples. Still is.

    The strength of a society rests on the excellence of its popcorn. - said no one ever save maybe me. 🤣

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    Erik Martin

    Sarah definitely doesn't get it about rotary phones. I'm a year younger than David, and about half the households in 80s had rotary phones. I believe most payphones were still rotary in the 80s. When I went to college in 1988, the common phone in the dorm hallway was rotary.

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      Jill

      Yep! I’m a year older than David and I concur with this. Anyone my age had certainly mastered the art of speed dialing a rotary phone by the time they were in middle school.

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    2. Jennifer Searcy

      this

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  9. Tim Richards

    My childhood was as difficult as David’s. Only rich kids had those fancy phones with push buttons.

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  10. Jrsimansky

    Born in 1966. Grew up in a house with two rotary phones. Like David, didn't use a push button phone until college.

    (Also had only a black-and-white TV and an original Pong game!)

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