Click Here for Donation Form
Wyoming Winds Index
WCH Home Page
Publication Information
More Links
Cathy Crowe's Home Page
US Interagency Council on Homelessness
Homeless Resource Center
National Shelter Listings
U. S. Organizations/Agencies
Canada Without Poverty
Canadian Links
Homeless Holocaust Survivor Leaves $100,000 Gift
By JEN THOMAS, Associated Press Writer
JERUSALEM, Israel (AP) Hebrew University has received a surprise donation of more than $100,000
from an unexpected benefactor, a woman who survived the Nazi
Holocaust and appeared to be destitute, a university official said Sunday.
Upon her death two years ago, a homeless Holocaust survivor living on the
streets of New York City willed the gift to the university. The Jewish
woman lived out of a shopping cart in Manhattan and had no known
relatives, said Yefet Ozery, Hebrew University's director of development
and public relations.
"She lived as a very poor woman. And when she died at the age of 92, it
was discovered she had accumulated close to $300,000," Ozery said.
The university first learned about the gift three months ago but did not
receive the money until this week. It will be used to fund scholarships
for medical research students, according to the woman's wishes, Ozery
said, refusing to disclose her name. The story was first reported by The
Jerusalem Post daily.
Not much is known about the woman, who had no known connection to the
university. She left the other half of her savings to various causes and
beneficiaries, though Ozery said it is unknown how she amassed the small
fortune.
"No one knows where she got it from. But she probably lived penny to
penny. She probably saved it to do good for the world and for the Jewish
people," Ozery said.
The woman's last known employer was a Jewish man in New York, who hired
her to move his car to avoid parking tickets in exchange for a hot meal
and a room, Ozery said. The woman also left that employer a portion of her
savings.
table of contents
Is It Now a Crime To Be Poor?
By BARBARA EHRENREICH
NY Times
IT’S too bad so many people are falling into poverty at a time when it’s almost illegal to be poor. You won’t be arrested for shopping in a Dollar Store, but if you are truly, deeply, in-the-streets poor, you’re well advised not to engage in any of the biological necessities of life — like sitting, sleeping, lying down or loitering. City officials boast that there is nothing discriminatory about the ordinances that afflict the destitute, most of which go back to the dawn of gentrification in the ’80s and ’90s. “If you’re lying on a sidewalk, whether you’re homeless or a millionaire, you’re in violation of the ordinance,” a city attorney in St. Petersburg, Fla., said in June, echoing Anatole France’s immortal observation that “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges.”
In defiance of all reason and compassion, the criminalization of poverty has actually been intensifying as the recession generates ever more poverty. So concludes a new study from the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty, which found that the number of ordinances against the publicly poor has been rising since 2006, along with ticketing and arrests for more “neutral” infractions like jaywalking, littering or carrying an open container of alcohol.
The report lists America’s 10 “meanest” cities — the largest of which are Honolulu, Los Angeles and San Francisco — but new contestants are springing up every day. The City Council in Grand Junction, Colo., has been considering a ban on begging, and at the end of June, Tempe, Ariz., carried out a four-day crackdown on the indigent. How do you know when someone is indigent? As a Las Vegas statute puts it, “An indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive” public assistance.
That could be me before the blow-drying and eyeliner, and it’s definitely Al Szekely at any time of day. A grizzled 62-year-old, he inhabits a wheelchair and is often found on G Street in Washington — the city that is ultimately responsible for the bullet he took in the spine in Fu Bai, Vietnam, in 1972. He had been enjoying the luxury of an indoor bed until last December, when the police swept through the shelter in the middle of the night looking for men with outstanding warrants.
It turned out that Mr. Szekely, who is an ordained minister and does not drink, do drugs or curse in front of ladies, did indeed have a warrant — for not appearing in court to face a charge of “criminal trespassing” (for sleeping on a sidewalk in a Washington suburb). So he was dragged out of the shelter and put in jail. “Can you imagine?” asked Eric Sheptock, the homeless advocate (himself a shelter resident) who introduced me to Mr. Szekely. “They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless.”
The viciousness of the official animus toward the indigent can be breathtaking. A few years ago, a group called Food Not Bombs started handing out free vegan food to hungry people in public parks around the nation. A number of cities, led by Las Vegas, passed ordinances forbidding the sharing of food with the indigent in public places, and several members of the group were arrested. A federal judge just overturned the anti-sharing law in Orlando, Fla., but the city is appealing. And now Middletown, Conn., is cracking down on food sharing.
If poverty tends to criminalize people, it is also true that criminalization inexorably impoverishes them. Scott Lovell, another homeless man I interviewed in Washington, earned his record by committing a significant crime — by participating in the armed robbery of a steakhouse when he was 15. Although Mr. Lovell dresses and speaks more like a summer tourist from Ohio than a felon, his criminal record has made it extremely difficult for him to find a job.
For Al Szekely, the arrest for trespassing meant a further descent down the circles of hell. While in jail, he lost his slot in the shelter and now sleeps outside the Verizon Center sports arena, where the big problem, in addition to the security guards, is mosquitoes. His stick-thin arms are covered with pink crusty sores, which he treats with a regimen of frantic scratching.
For the not-yet-homeless, there are two main paths to criminalization — one involving debt, and the other skin color. Anyone of any color or pre-recession financial status can fall into debt, and although we pride ourselves on the abolition of debtors’ prison, in at least one state, Texas, people who can’t afford to pay their traffic fines may be made to “sit out their tickets” in jail.
Often the path to legal trouble begins when one of your creditors has a court issue a summons for you, which you fail to honor for one reason or another. (Maybe your address has changed or you never received it.) Now you’re in contempt of court. Or suppose you miss a payment and, before you realize it, your car insurance lapses; then you’re stopped for something like a broken headlight. Depending on the state, you may have your car impounded or face a steep fine — again, exposing you to a possible summons. “There’s just no end to it once the cycle starts,” said Robert Solomon of Yale Law School. “It just keeps accelerating.”
By far the most reliable way to be criminalized by poverty is to have the wrong-color skin. Indignation runs high when a celebrity professor encounters racial profiling, but for decades whole communities have been effectively “profiled” for the suspicious combination of being both dark-skinned and poor, thanks to the “broken windows” or “zero tolerance” theory of policing popularized by Rudy Giuliani, when he was mayor of New York City, and his police chief William Bratton.
Flick a cigarette in a heavily patrolled community of color and you’re littering; wear the wrong color T-shirt and you’re displaying gang allegiance. Just strolling around in a dodgy neighborhood can mark you as a potential suspect, according to “Let’s Get Free: A Hip-Hop Theory of Justice,” an eye-opening new book by Paul Butler, a former federal prosecutor in Washington. If you seem at all evasive, which I suppose is like looking “overly anxious” in an airport, Mr. Butler writes, the police “can force you to stop just to investigate why you don’t want to talk to them.” And don’t get grumpy about it or you could be “resisting arrest.”
There’s no minimum age for being sucked into what the Children’s Defense Fund calls “the cradle-to-prison pipeline.” In New York City, a teenager caught in public housing without an ID — say, while visiting a friend or relative — can be charged with criminal trespassing and wind up in juvenile detention, Mishi Faruqee, the director of youth justice programs for the Children’s Defense Fund of New York, told me. In just the past few months, a growing number of cities have taken to ticketing and sometimes handcuffing teenagers found on the streets during school hours.
In Los Angeles, the fine for truancy is $250; in Dallas, it can be as much as $500 — crushing amounts for people living near the poverty level. According to the Los Angeles Bus Riders Union, an advocacy group, 12,000 students were ticketed for truancy in 2008.
Why does the Bus Riders Union care? Because it estimates that 80 percent of the “truants,” especially those who are black or Latino, are merely late for school, thanks to the way that over-filled buses whiz by them without stopping. I met people in Los Angeles who told me they keep their children home if there’s the slightest chance of their being late. It’s an ingenious anti-truancy policy that discourages parents from sending their youngsters to school.
The pattern is to curtail financing for services that might help the poor while ramping up law enforcement: starve school and public transportation budgets, then make truancy illegal. Shut down public housing, then make it a crime to be homeless. Be sure to harass street vendors when there are few other opportunities for employment. The experience of the poor, and especially poor minorities, comes to resemble that of a rat in a cage scrambling to avoid erratically administered electric shocks.
And if you should make the mistake of trying to escape via a brief marijuana-induced high, it’s “gotcha” all over again, because that of course is illegal too. One result is our staggering level of incarceration, the highest in the world. Today the same number of Americans — 2.3 million — reside in prison as in public housing.
Meanwhile, the public housing that remains has become ever more prisonlike, with residents subjected to drug testing and random police sweeps. The safety net, or what’s left of it, has been transformed into a dragnet.
Some of the community organizers I’ve talked to around the country think they know why “zero tolerance” policing has ratcheted up since the recession began. Leonardo Vilchis of the Union de Vecinos, a community organization in Los Angeles, suspects that “poor people have become a source of revenue” for recession-starved cities, and that the police can always find a violation leading to a fine. If so, this is a singularly demented fund-raising strategy. At a Congressional hearing in June, the president of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers testified about the pervasive “overcriminalization of crimes that are not a risk to public safety,” like sleeping in a cardboard box or jumping turnstiles, which leads to expensively clogged courts and prisons.
A Pew Center study released in March found states spending a record $51.7 billion on corrections, an amount that the center judged, with an excess of moderation, to be “too much.”
But will it be enough — the collision of rising prison populations that we can’t afford and the criminalization of poverty — to force us to break the mad cycle of poverty and punishment? With the number of people in poverty increasing (some estimates suggest it’s up to 45 million to 50 million, from 37 million in 2007) several states are beginning to ease up on the criminalization of poverty — for example, by sending drug offenders to treatment rather than jail, shortening probation and reducing the number of people locked up for technical violations like missed court appointments. But others are tightening the screws: not only increasing the number of “crimes” but also charging prisoners for their room and board — assuring that they’ll be released with potentially criminalizing levels of debt.
Maybe we can’t afford the measures that would begin to alleviate America’s growing poverty — affordable housing, good schools, reliable public transportation and so forth. I would argue otherwise, but for now I’d be content with a consensus that, if we can’t afford to truly help the poor, neither can we afford to go on tormenting them.
table of contents
Once Homeless and Addicted,
Portland Man Wins Prestigious Scholarship
by Tom Hallman Jr.,
The Oregonian
Carl Parsons stood outside Old Town's Union Gospel Mission one morning this week. Around him, homeless people, some wrapped in dirty blankets, shuffled into line for clothes and a bite to eat.
Not so long ago, Parsons was one of them.
"Alcohol and drugs," said Parsons, 35. "That was me. I'd burned all my bridges. Family was gone. You name it. There was no going back."
Now he's come further than he ever could have imagined. He's clean. He's housed. And he just landed a full-ride scholarship to attend a university.
Parsons traces it all to a choice he was given just an hour to make.
Back in 2005, Parsons had been homeless a dozen years, since he was 19. He was living in a truck in a Wal-Mart parking lot in New Hampshire. A friend in Portland persuaded him to come here, telling Parsons he had it good.
But Parsons found only more disappointment.
"I realized he was in worse shape than I was," Parsons said.
Still, he stayed. "I did day labor, drank and used drugs. I was a big pill popper. That March, I came down to Old Town for a free meal. There was a line of about 200 guys at the mission. I just blended in."
He heard about Union Gospel's LifeChange program on the street. He asked about it at the front desk, and a man gave him a 45-page handbook. Parsons went outside and read it on a bench. After 90 minutes, he returned to apply. The man gave him a 25-page application but told him there were no openings.
"But when I was walking away, he came outside and asked me if I was serious. I told him I was."
The man told him he'd find him a place. But there was a big condition: "He told me he'd hold a spot for one hour. If I came back, the spot was mine. If I didn't, the spot was lost."
It was a big decision. The program is no quick fix. Those who are accepted live at the mission for four years and must get straight, work at the mission and confront their demons.
"The first week was rough," he said. "I had no idea what I'd gotten myself into. I hated it. I was a pretty pathetic creature. My first roommate left the program after three months and ended up dying on the street from alcohol. He was about my age."
Bill Russell, the mission's executive director, said dropouts are common. According to LifeChange statistics, by the time people land there, they've failed an average of seven other addiction-recovery programs. They are the hardest of hard cases.
"We're the last shot for them," Russell said. "It's either prison or death."
But Parsons stuck it out, surprising even himself. "I'd always been a quitter," he said. "I'd start a thousand things and never finish one of them."
Then just over a year ago, LifeChange sent him to Portland Community College to meet with a career counselor.
"I'd never given education a shot," Parsons said. "But I always had this ache inside me to see what would happen if I tried."
Last December, he paid $25 to take tests at Portland Community College to earn college credit. He passed.
"He's an amazing guy," said Kevin Campbell, the mission's finance director. "If he's not the brightest person to come through our doors, he's one of the brightest."
An adviser suggested that he enroll in classes. So in January, he signed up for PCC courses in business, math and writing.
"I found out I liked school," he said. "What I didn't know was how long I could afford to keep going. My business professor found a place that looks for scholarships."
Parsons filled out forms and wrote essays. In April, he learned he was among 621 applicants for a Ford Family Foundation ReStart Scholarship, geared toward nontraditional students who are starting or returning to college. The scholarship is among several offered by the foundation, started in 1957 by Roseburg Forest Products founder Kenneth W. Ford.
It's highly coveted, paying up to $25,000 a year for college costs -- and renewable for four years as long as students keep up their grades.
Then Parsons received a letter telling him he was among 90 applicants who would be interviewed.
"PCC had a class on how to present yourself during an interview," Parsons said. "The instructor asked what I was there for. When I said the Ford Foundation, he said it was an incredible opportunity. I'd never looked at the paperwork before. I did and found out it would pay for four years of college."
In May, Parsons drove to Eugene and stepped into a room at the University of Oregon for a formal interview.
"It just hit me," he said. "This was the first opportunity in my life to do something different. I had a chance at a fresh start."
Three board members conducted the interview and told him he'd receive a letter either way. In early June, it came: He was one of 45 chosen.
"It's an honor," said Tricia Tate, the scholarship's program manager. "It's a rigorous and intense selection process."
Parsons is now on the dean's list at PCC with a 3.7 grade-point average. He will continue at PCC this year, then enroll at Portland State University. He's also in the process of moving out of the mission. The scholarship will pay for room and board.
"It's mind-boggling," Parsons said. "My life had been so clouded by drugs and alcohol that I'd never had the chance to see my own potential."
Now, he has his life back, he said, and something to work toward.
"In life, we have the chance to be a good or bad example to others," he said. "For too long, I was a bad example. Now I can show people that they can change. I did."
table of contents
In the Summer, Forests in U.S. Are Hot Spots for Squatters
by Dennis Wagner
The Arizona Republic
For most of the past three years, Mark Reno lived at no cost in the piney woods just north of Payson.
Now, he is beginning a six-month stint in federal prison at taxpayer expense, convicted of setting up an unlawful residence in the Tonto National Forest.
Among the thousands of squatters who become semipermanent denizens on public lands nationwide, Reno appears to be unusual only because he got caught so often that he was finally put behind bars.
Under federal law, national forests are reserved for recreational use by the public. It is a Class B misdemeanor to set up a residence or to remain in any forest for more than two weeks during a 30-day period. The maximum punishment is a $5,000 fine and six months of incarceration.
No one knows exactly how many people inhabit Arizona's high country because they strive to avoid detection. Bray Addison, acting patrol captain in the Tonto forest, said rangers recorded 147 incidents with suspected squatters in the past five years, including 39 who were cited. He said Reno, 57, who was caught at least four times, is the only defendant to be imprisoned.
Reno could not be reached. It is unclear why he chooses to keep returning to the national forest.
The squatter phenomenon is a problem on public lands nationwide, especially in Western states, where the federal government owns more than half of all property.
"When I first came to this district, I had a guy who built a cabin in the forest," Addison said. "A lot of them have other issues (such as mental illness). I see vets who are still struggling, and there are druggies."
Jon Nelson, patrol captain in the Coconino National Forest, said an annual migration begins when hot weather sets in. "Every summer, we have an influx of residential-use visitors from the desert communities," Nelson said. "It gets too hot in Quartzsite."
Squatters, more often in RVs or trailers than tents, camp within a few miles of towns where they can find work, buy supplies and take advantage of public services. Nelson said some stay in one location for months or years, damaging the woods, adding to fire dangers and creating sanitation problems.
"If we allowed people to use the national forest for residential purposes," he said, "we'd have tent cities everywhere."
Nelson said rangers recently found a camp outside Flagstaff that had been occupied for five or six years. He said the resident, who suffers from schizophrenia, was finally located, given medications and placed in a shelter.
Nelson said scofflaw residents play a cat-and-mouse game with rangers, hopscotching from campsite to campsite. Like other homeless folks, they generally manage to stay beneath the public radar and out of jail. But there are exceptions, especially when squatters get involved in other crimes or create outback villages.
Two years ago in Florida's Ocala National Forest, rangers evicted about 500 residents from shantytowns after a Boy Scout was assaulted with a knife and after public complaints that the area was a haven for fugitives and drug dealers.
A year earlier, the Forest Service near Steamboat Springs, Colo., doled out citations to members of the Rainbow Family of Living Light, a gathering of 10,000 free spirits who converged on the Routt National Forest.
In the Tonto, rangers and sheriff's deputies have come across several giant marijuana farms cultivated by illegal immigrants camping in the woods. One operation, discovered in 2006, involved an estimated $30 million worth of cannabis east of Payson. In Northern California, pot farms tended by armed squatters prompted the Bush administration to launch an eradication campaign two years ago.
Reno has no known criminal record. His background remains obscure. Craig Orent, a federal public defender who represented Reno, declined to comment.
Bill Tonstad, a Payson liquor-store owner, said he has known Reno for about five years. Tonstad said he helped Reno find work and housing several times, but Reno always wound up back in the woods. Reno roamed a circuit of local churches for free food, he added, and washed dishes at several restaurants, but nothing stuck.
"He just used the system," Tonstad said. "I hired him to do some painting once but had to fire him because he didn't show up."
Nancy Greene, manager of the Rye Creek Bar & Restaurant south of Payson, said Reno washed dishes there for a few months last year, living in a trailer out back.
"One day he was working, and the next he never came back," Greene said. "I couldn't understand why. . . . He never called. Never said goodbye."
Tonstad said that was typical for Reno. "He's lived in the forest all his life. I guess the best answer is: He just doesn't like working."
U.S. District Court records tell the story:
In January 2008, Reno was cited by a sheriff's deputy for trespassing in the Tonto National Forest, living in a trailer off Arizona 87, surrounded by garbage and human waste. Six weeks later, a forest ranger found him in the same location. Reno said a friend gave him the trailer and towed it to the location. Its tires had gone flat and were mired in mud.
Reno was cited again. After pleading guilty, he was placed on probation, banned from the forest, ordered to clean up the mess and required to do community service.
Court records show that Reno violated all the probation terms, and an arrest warrant was issued. In January, Reno was found and arrested at a new campsite, just north of Payson. Three tents were surrounded by trash.
Six months later, Reno was back at the same camp. A forest ranger's report describes the scene: "I saw bottles of urine and fecal matter with toilet paper strewn about in various locations. It appeared that food wrappers and cans had been consumed and thrown about the area."
Reno was arrested and held without bail. He admitted violating probation and residing in the forest illegally.
Last month, U.S. Magistrate Edward Voss sentenced Reno to prison, followed by 180 days at a halfway house. He got two years' probation, plus 100 hours of community service.
table of contents
Florida Led the Nation Last Year in Violence Against the Homeless
Scott Wyman
Sun Sentinel
Last September, a homeless woman in Pompano Beach was raped and nearly strangled. Earlier in the year, two homeless men in West Palm Beach were shot and killed and a Fort Lauderdale man was accused of harassing the homeless with a chainsaw.
Florida led the nation for the fourth consecutive year in violence against the homeless in a report released Saturday by the National Coalition for the Homeless. The group documented 30 attacks last year in 10 communities across the state, including three deaths.
Homeless rights advocates want governments to do more to prevent violence, including passing laws that deem such attacks to be hate crimes.
"We need to stop dehumanizing the homeless," said Sean Cononie, who runs the Homeless Voice shelter in Hollywood. "People think it isn't important – that homeless people aren't important, that homeless people are nobodies."
According to the report, most of the assaults are committed by teens and young adults and that the homeless are often singled out for attack because of prejudice. The researchers said the homeless are one of the nation's most victimized groups, but often do not want to report attacks.
The number of violent incidents against the homeless nationally has grown from 60 in 1999 to 106 last year, even though that's down from the 160 detailed by the homeless coalition in 2007. The report collected information from police and news reports as well as incidents reported by local homeless groups and excluded instances of brutality between homeless people.
"A clear and alarming pattern has emerged that shows the homeless population faces an additional risk of extreme violence," said Brian Levin, a professor at the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University- San Bernardino, in a separate report on homelessness.
South Florida accounted for most of the attacks in the state last year. They included the attempted rape of a homeless woman in February in Dania Beach, the bludgeoning of a homeless man in Fort Lauderdale the same month and the beating and robbery of a homeless man in October in Pompano Beach that included the theft of his wheelchair.
Homeless advocates worry about new trends behind attacks on the homeless. They've discovered recently an Internet phenomenon of "bum fight" or "bum hunting" videos in which young men attack the homeless or pay transients to fight each other.
"Kids live what they learn, and they learn either selfishness or generosity," said Lois Cross of the Homeless Voice shelter. "They are growing up with no value for a human life."
But in Florida, homeless advocates attribute much of violence against homeless to dehumanization created by the attitudes of local officials and laws restricting where the homeless can eat, sleep and hang out. Fort Lauderdale cracked down this year on homeless in downtown's Stranahan Park, for example.
The homeless coalition is promoting legislation in Tallahassee that would protect the homeless under the state hate crimes law. It also wants national legislation to require law enforcement agencies to keep data on violence against the homeless.
table of contents
Wyoming Winds
is published by the Wyoming Coalition for the Homeless
907 Logan Avenue
Cheyenne, WY 82001-5247
phone: 307-634-8499
fax: 307-634-9089
email: wch@vcn.com
Views expressed in this newsletter are not necessarily those of the Wyoming Coalition for the Homeless, its staff or board.
Editor: Virginia Sellner.
Copyrights revert back to the author upon publication.
WCH is a 501(c)(3) non-profit agency depending upon the community for funding.
© 2009.
**In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only.**
table of contents
![[VolunteerMatch - Where Volunteering Begins.]](http://www.volunteermatch.org/images/2.0/new_logo.gif){kind=logo}
