City needs real solution

It seems Los Angeles hasn’t learned its lesson about
repeatedly sweeping its problems under the proverbial rug.

This time, it’s the homeless population that’s been
victimized, in hopes of making the city more appealing to tourists,
developers and wealthy property owners.

The only solution to the city’s drug problem Los Angeles
seems able to comprehend is to imprison the homeless.

Drugs and drug dealing are facts of life in many if not most
areas of this country, but selective enforcement of drug laws that
have been shown to perpetuate the problem have been deliberately
used to oppress those of low income in the pursuit of
gentrification and profits for developers.

The homeless have been moved from place to place as is
convenient. Their disenfranchised lives have been made increasingly
difficult by the city making public benches uncomfortable and
shelters closing over summer.

Those dislocated by these efforts of the wealthy and their pet
police are shoved farther and farther into the periphery as the gap
between rich and poor widens every year.

Some would argue the homeless are better off in jail, but one
must take into account the cost to taxpayers for imprisoning
greater and greater segments of the population yearly ““ over
$20,000 per inmate, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics,
U.S. Department of Justice.

Our prison system is also a revolving-door hellhole that
accomplishes little but torturing its inhabitants and ensuring
their stigmatization upon release.

Locking the destitute in torturous conditions may make sense
from the perspective of property developers, but as a society it
serves to increase segregation, stratification and spending.

Drug addiction should be treated as a disease, not a crime.

Despite the undesirability of the homeless living among us,
there has been little done to prevent and alleviate “the
homeless problem.”

The recent hike in drug-related arrests in Skid Row will put
many drug dealers and users in prison, and it may eventually clear
out Skid Row and push its residents into lower-income
neighborhoods.

But it will do absolutely nothing to solve the underlying
problems of drug addiction and homelessness that will plague our
society as long as we offer no way out for those at the absolute
socio-economic bottom.

It does not take much imagination to figure out why.

Having no address, money, clean clothes or place in which to
practice hygiene makes it next to impossible to get a job.

Many homeless shelters, which treat their patrons like cattle in
feedlots and routinely force them to wait only to throw them out,
are no viable solution without major reforms.

Other solutions, such as drug rehabilitation and shelter reform,
will go a long way toward solving these social problems with
greater benefits to our society and the homeless themselves, rather
than expanding our already overflowing incarcerated population.

Jones is a fourth-year history student and Ionescu is a
second-year international development studies student. They are
members of the Social Justice Alliance.