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The Tennessee General Assembly’s latest move to criminalize homelessness could be challenged in court

BY AMANDA HAGGARD

A 2022 case study and litigation manual by the National Homelessness Law Center says, “the majority of successful litigation challenging criminalization policies are against camping bans,” and sweeps of encampments.

The National Homelessness Law Center is a nonprofit organization based in Washington, D.C., that seeks to serve as the legal arm of the national movement to end and prevent homelessness. They publish studies, reports and more on the criminalization of homelessness, and provide resources on how to fight against it.

Like the latest bill out of the state legislature

that makes camping on public land a felony, most camping bans are often written to cover a broad range of activities, including merely sleeping outside, the study says.

“Despite a lack of affordable housing and shelter space, governments have chosen to threaten, arrest, and ticket homeless persons for performing life-sustaining activities — such as sleeping or sitting down — in outdoor public space,” the executive summary from the study reads.

Sixty percent of cases in the study were able to successfully fight the bans — at the time of the report, only four states had statewide camping bans, but 15 had laws restricting camping in certain public areas.

“In 2019, 72 percent of our 187 surveyed cities had at least one law restricting camping in public,” the study reads.

Suits against bans varied from First Amendment challenges, which, of course, hold that sleeping and tents can be expression protected under free speech as well as exemptions for religious use by churches using their land to house people experiencing homelessness.

“Because people experiencing homelessness are not on the street by choice but because they lack choices, criminal and civil punishment serves no constructive purpose,” the study says. “Instead, criminalizing homelessness creates acute harm and wastes precious public resources on policies that do not work to reduce homelessness. Indeed, arrests, unaffordable tickets, and displacement from public space for doing what any human being must do to survive can make homelessness more difficult to escape.”