This posting is a follow-up to my surviving homelessness series:
What To Do When You Are Facing Homelessness | Adora Myers
How To Help Someone Facing Homelessness | Adora Myers
Part 1: How to Help Someone Facing Homelessness | Adora Myers
Part 2: How To Help Someone Facing Homelessness | Adora Myers
Part 3: How To Help Someone Facing Homelessness | Adora Myers
The focus of this post is our new collective reality under the government just elected to office.
Before we get into the advice, please familiarize yourself with the following legal issues (specific to the USA but the equivalent should be considered everywhere).
Prison Slavery/Prison Labor
Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers | ACLU
Prison Labor and the Thirteenth Amendment
Slavery in America
Privatized Prisons and Mass Incarceration
Private Prisons in the United States – The Sentencing Project
Private prison – Wikipedia
Mass Incarceration | American Civil Liberties Union
Corporations Exploiting Prison Labor
In U.S. Prisons, a New Battle Over an Old Institution: Forced Labor | The Marshall Project
Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers | ACLU
12 Major Corporations Benefiting from the Prison Industrial Complex | Malta Justice Initiative
U.S. prison labor programs violate fundamental human rights, new report finds | University of Chicago News
12 Major Corporations Benefiting from the Prison Industrial Complex | Malta Justice Initiative
How much do incarcerated people earn in each state? | Prison Policy Initiative
Homelessness under fascism – some realities
- Money, Prison, and Slavery: Those links touch on the financial benefits wealthy people and large corporations receive from moving a large number of people into the prison system and keeping them there for as long as possible. In the USA slavery never went away, it just moved into the prison system, and any community of people who can be ‘justifiably incarcerated’ just for existing, is in serious danger of enslavement – because that’s how the system is designed to work, per our constitution – 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865) | National Archives “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”.
As homeless sweeps increase along with laws criminalizing poverty in general and homelessness in particular, the number of people moved off the streets and into the prison system will also increase. Once they have you in a corporate run prison working as a slave for other corporations, the corporation running the prison can, and will, find excuses to keep you there for as long as possible.
Once in prison, you will probably notice that the corporations buying your slave labor are the same companies that would not hire you while you were trying to escape homelessness and/or poverty, or they were only willing to pay a wage that was less than the bare minimum needed to cover the cost of living. A person who is incarcerated costs that substandard wage or less, and the company running the prison keeps both government payments for holding prisoners and most – or all – of that wage because prisoners can be forced to work without pay or must be paid the minimum amount of .25 cents per hour (or another nauseatingly low amount).
All of the usual downsides to prison still exist, including but not limited to sexual assault by guards and/or prisoners, violence, substandard food, being forced to pay insane rates for phone calls to family and ‘luxury items’ (e.g.: underwear) from their prison store, being blocked from mandatory healthcare services, etc.
Advice: If you are currently surviving homelessness, do everything in your power to avoid arrest.
2. The Cruelty is the point: The calls for changes to the system, based on how they affect poverty survivors in general and homeless survivors in particular, have always fallen on deaf ears. Research pointing to the health effects and increased mortality (e.g., death rates) of the homeless population will be of interest to the new administration because increasing the sweeps will increase the deaths.
These are the same people who laughed at traumatized children forcibly removed from their parents simply because they were trying to apply for asylum at the southern border. Do not make the mistake of thinking they will treat you better.
This also means there’s a strong possibility that playing the ‘deserving poor‘ card may become less effective and basically useless. Poverty survivors are criminalized because they are poor. Period.
According to Project 2025, there are plans to increase the use of police to achieve political goals. Many of these goals are based in white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, and classism. If you are surviving homelessness, expect everything discussed in the following articles to apply to you, regardless of your race, gender, sexual identity. etc.
Project-2025-Justice-Reform
What Project 2025 Means for Black Communities: Criminal Legal System – The Thurgood Marshall Institute at LDF
Trump and Project 2025 plan to turn civil rights law against the vulnerable | Vox
Project 2025: Trump’s blueprint in place in Argentina | openDemocracy
How will Project 2025 impact the lives of the poor? | WYPR
Advice: If you are currently surviving homelessness, do everything in your power to avoid interacting with the police under any circumstances.
3. Invisibility is key: If you are visibly homeless, expect to be targeted first. This is an easy way to earn the support of NIMBYs (even left wing NIBYs) and establish precedence for increased police presence, police violence, etc. Fascist governments always begin with the poverty survivors for this reason.
If you have been in the system for a while, but are not visibly homeless, expect to be targeted next. All of those invasive questionaries and databases of poverty survivors maintained by non-profits and government agencies can be turned into a human hit list. All of the plans outlined in Project 2025 indicate that the focus is on stripping funding from organizations and government agencies that assist poverty survivors, which will force more people into homelessness. While the database may not be used to hunt people down, they can be used to create excuses for sending people to prison on their first arrest. While there’s no way to know what, exactly, will happen, this is the kind of action this administration is known for taking.
Advice: Prepare for the worst
A) Network with fellow poverty survivors and lay out plans for remaining housed and as-invisible-as-possible, regardless of how many agencies are cut.
B) If you are currently homeless and have true, reliable, recently used, wilderness skills, it may be best to find the deepest wilderness available to you and disappear into it.
C) If you are homeless and unsheltered, try to find shelter. I know the vast majority of you are already trying to do that, but the urgency has just ramped up to CRITICAL.
D) As much as I hate to say it, if you are female and have the option of establishing a relationship with a man to ensure housing – that option may be unavoidable over the next 4 years. Chose CAREFULLY and continue to ignore the ‘just get a man’ advice from the ‘homeless service providers’ (particularly the religious ones – their purposeful ignorance is mind boggling) because, as we all know, you are a sheep walking into the lion’s den. If you can manipulate the situation to your advantage without risking the life and wellbeing of yourself and/or your children, then consider the option carefully before pursuing. If you have any other option, take it!!! If the republications have their way, getting out of a relationship with a man (any kind of relationship) is going to get complicated and potentially dangerous, really fast.
E) If you are female and have a group of females who are willing and able to work and live together, then pursue that option aggressively!
F) Talk to fellow poverty survivors and brainstorm ideas for getting through the immediate moment and plan for worst-case scenarios.
It’s an impossible task. Many will fail, despite doing everything possible to prevent failure.
Allways assume that increasing the number of vulnerable people for the purposes of workforce exploitation (read: slavery) is the administration’s objective (see item 1, above) and act accordingly.