Opinion

View Articles in Other Categories

Greyhound Therapy: Symptom of a Failed Mental Health System

Commentary
Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas handed out bus tickets to about 1500 gravely disabled patients, “transferring” them to states all over the country. Patients were sent to states where they had never been a resident and areas that had no mental institution prepared to receive them.

Penciled Out of Existence by Some Grand Authority

Commentary
Our society doesn't want to be inconvenienced by someone who is suffering or is impoverished. As a disabled person, it feels as if I have been penciled out of existence by some grand authority, one which expects me to disappear into nothingness, or end up jailed, homeless or just dead.

The New Housing for the Homeless: Prison Cells

Opinion
No politician wants to be accused of working to eliminate jobs! So, the pressure to keep the prisons full is great. Criminalizing homelessness could be seen as a double win — keeping the prisons full while also “solving” the homelessness issue by giving homeless people beds in prison.

Laura’s Law Turns a Psychiatric Diagnosis into a Crime

Commentary
Laura’s Law criminalizes mental illness and is spreading like cancer across California, county by county. Those labeled “noncompliant” can be subjected to forced medication and court-ordered involuntary treatment. In essence, they become captives of the criminal justice system even though they have committed no offense.

Liberty City and the Christmas Miracle

Opinion
Thanks to the initiative of homeless people, the sleep-in grew into several weeks of relative safety for people otherwise being shoveled out of parks like trash or hustled off public streets by the merchant groups’ hired patrols. The homeless people developed a functional government and crafted “no drugs or alcohol” rules.

Nothing Works Quite As Well As Housing

Opinion
Our lack of affordable housing is a real public health crisis — the result of 30 years of complete neglect of homeless people by Mayor Tom Bates and, before that, his wife, former Mayor Loni Hancock. Their housing policy has been to ignore the people sleeping in parks, under overpasses and in alleys.

As Rents Skyrocket, Berkeley Attacks A Familiar Scapegoat

Opinion
The second vote on the anti-homeless laws came on December 1, 2015, exactly 60 years to the day that Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on that Montgomery Bus. On the 60th anniversary of Rosa Park’s historic action, the City Council is rolling back those civil rights in Berkeley.

On Homelessness and Human Rights in Santa Cruz

Opinion
Santa Cruz has enacted bans on sleeping in parks and in vehicles, bans on blankets, and bans on sitting, camping, sleeping, breathing, resting, dreaming and existing. Have the activists been noisy and “boisterous” in protesting the cruel attacks on poor people in their community? Thank God they have.

Cities that Criminalize the Poor Risk Losing HUD Funding

Opinion
It’s one thing to show the fallacy of giving tickets to people with no money, and wasting police resources on issues which would disappear if everybody had somewhere to live. But HUD is offering to share two billion dollars in federal funding with cities —if they stop criminalizing the poor.

Broken Windows Transcript

Opinion
Join Ibrahim Mubarak, Right 2 Survive; Benjamin Donlon, Denver Homeless Out Loud; JoJo Smith, Los Angeles Community Action Network, Shayla Myers, Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles; Liz Brown, San Francisco State University; and Sulaiman Hyatt, BlackLivesMatter Bay Area chapter at a panel discussion organized by the Western Regional Advocacy Project. Speakers address the links business improvements districts increasing power in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver and other cities to how policing is connected to racial and economic segregation, gentrification and mass incarceration.

Broken Windows Policing Breaks Lives Apart

Opinion
We will continue our organizing efforts against the Business Improvement Districts and anyone who encourages police harassment and incarceration of poor and homeless people. We are not broken windows and we will continue to fight this violent system trying to break us until we are all free.