Survival Is Not a Crime: The Urgency of Decriminalizing Homelessness

In Montreal, the vast majority of charges laid against people experiencing homelessness are not crimes against the person, a study has shown. Their offences are instead related to survival, such as theft of food or clothing. Delve deeper and you’ll turn up similar cases, such as charges of breaking and entering for people simply seeking shelter in an abandoned building.

Due to a lack of appropriate resources to meet people’s needs, an ineffective and counterproductive criminal justice approach to homelessness has emerged. It is not a crime to exist in public space. Yet our treatment of marginality in recent years suggests the opposite.

Charges for minor offences

Research by Paul Eid, a professor of sociology at UQAM, and Donald Tremblay, director of the Clinique juridique itinérante, is instructive: it tells a story of judicialization founded on the breach of unrealistic conditions. We are requiring people without homes to avoid certain public places, or people with untreated addictions to stop all consumption, under penalty of sanctions.

Which means we are not judicializing dangerousness. We are judicializing survival.

The research demonstrates as much and we are finding it at the Old Brewery Mission: people experiencing homelessness are not in themselves a threat to public safety. As the late professor Céline Bellot noted, they end up being victims of criminality more often than the rest of the population.

By criminalizing them, we are putting roadblocks in their path and weighing them down with criminal records, complicating their social reinsertion. In Quebec’s provincial correctional facilities, more than one person out of five experiences visible homelessness. When they leave prison, too many people find themselves rudderless and destitute. We create a cycle in which homelessness leads to judicialization… which leads to more homelessness.

Throughout this time, we fuel a feeling of insecurity that relies much more on the visibility of the distress than on actual threat. And we respond to this perception with more repression and rejection. Disturbance must not be conflated with danger.

Solutions to judicialization

It is therefore essential that the City of Montreal and the SPVM redouble their efforts to limit judicialization and eliminate social profiling. Changing the municipal bylaws to stop judicializing a presence in public space, and continuing to sensitize SPVM personnel to the realities of people experiencing homelessness would foster a more effective and human approach. The new encampment management protocol illustrates the city’s willingness to act in this direction.
Other solutions to overcriminalization must also be supported.

For example, with the Programme d’accompagnement justice et intervention communautaire, which exists at the Montreal’s municipal court in collaboration with the Clinique Droits Devant, the penal situation of people experiencing homelessness who appear in court can be regularized if they enrol in a social reinsertion process.

Support before and after prison must also be reinforced. In this sense, we must launch and support programs like the Old Brewery Mission’s Après l’ombre, which aims to help people leaving prison find community or private housing.
Housing: the key to reducing homelessness and criminalization

However, we will never resolve homelessness in public space without resolving homelessness itself.
The solution is simple and known: rehouse, massively and sustainably.

Giving a person access to stable housing, with the necessary support, reduces that unavoidable presence in public space and alleviates feelings of insecurity. The fewer people there are in the street, the fewer tensions there will be. The less judicialization there is, the greater the security. Developing more housing, all over Montreal, is about offering stabilization to people experiencing homelessness and to our neighbourhoods.

Continuing to criminalize homelessness is instead about choosing to eliminate the bothersome rather than attacking the cause. It is about transforming a social issue into a criminal problem.

If we truly want safer living environments, the answer is simple: get people out of the street with housing, not incarceration.

James Hughes
President and CEO, Old Brewery Mission