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**AUGUST 11, 2025**
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I had been planning a story about the incarceration/homelessness cycle when I met Bow, a man arrested for sleeping on the New Haven Green—the exact spot where the state had dropped him off when releasing him from prison. While I was reporting, the Trump administration issued an executive order encouraging states to police and institutionalize unhoused people. After spending three years reporting in some of the country’s poorest communities for my book,
**Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S. Poverty**, I can still be shocked [link removed], as I was when I learned that billionaires are behind the movement to punish people for being unhoused. As Bow said, it’s mind-boggling.
**–Colleen Shaddox**
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QIAN WEIZHONG/VCG/AP PHOTO
When Sleeping Is a Crime [link removed]
Strongbow Lone Eagle, 56, was charged with trespassing on the New Haven Green, where he had been staying in a tent. Police also took him in on warrants for failure to register his address as a sex offender. Lone Eagle literally did not have an address. The green was the very spot that the state Department of Correction had dropped him off when he finished serving his sentence, with all of $400 in his pocket. Lone Eagle called the experience, which included a night in jail, “mind-boggling.”
He is caught in the homelessness/incarceration cycle, which has gotten increasingly vicious of late. In its **2024
**Grants Pass** decision** [link removed], the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that governments may arrest or fine people for sleeping on public land. Since then, **more than 200 municipalities** [link removed] have passed ordinances against people sleeping outdoors. In July, **President Donald Trump issued an executive order** [link removed] further criminalizing homelessness and directing federal funding toward jurisdictions taking punitive approaches to unsheltered people. The executive order followed closely on the passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which included **massive cuts** [link removed] to health and nutrition programs for low-income communities. The administration is also proposing **cuts and time limits** [link removed] for the Housing Choice Voucher Program (Section 8), which provides rental assistance. It is a perfect storm aimed at people who were already soaking wet.
The criminalization of homelessness is not new. People who have been incarcerated are **ten times as likely** [link removed] to become unhoused as the general public, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. Meanwhile, people living unsheltered had an **average of 21 interactions with police** [link removed] over a six-month period, according to a study that the California Policy Lab conducted in five states.
The old idea of punishing people for being unhoused is getting new, well-financed backing. The **Cicero Institute** [link removed] advocates involuntary commitment to mental health facilities of unhoused people and is critical of “housing first” approaches that get people off the streets rapidly with offers of voluntary treatment. The Institute did not respond to requests for comment.
The think tank provides model legislation to encourage states to criminalize homelessness. Its literature blames the housing-first philosophy for the increase in homelessness but does not mention the rising cost of housing. (**A 2022 analysis by the Pew Charitable Trusts** [link removed] quantified the intuitive lesson: When rents go up, homelessness follows.) The Cicero Institute’s materials foment fear of unhoused people, whom they paint as a source of addiction-fueled crime. Trump’s executive order is titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets.”
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