Situating homelessness, criminal legal system involvement, and eviction as interlocking mechanisms: toward generating structural and contextualized policy and practice recommendations to further social justice for those impacted
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Citation
Abstract
Homelessness, criminal legal system involvement, and eviction are each prevalent phenomena in the United States today that have significant, deleterious social and health consequences for those impacted. They also each disproportionately impact the same vulnerable and marginalized populations, including BIPOC persons and those with disabilities. Beyond these shared population-level impacts, the same individuals often experience more than one of these events, for example an eviction leading to homelessness or an arrest while sleeping outside. However, despite these acknowledged associations, to the author’s knowledge there is no prior research that looks at all three of these phenomena jointly within the same study. This study addresses this gap in the literature using a mixed methodology comprising (1) semi-structured interviews with individuals who have experienced all three of the phenomena of study, which were analyzed using connecting, categorizing, and contextualizing strategies, and (2) sequencing and cluster analysis of matched administrative data to examine the patterning of these events and associated demographics. Key overall findings include: (1) homelessness, criminal legal system involvement, and eviction are often-nebulous phenomena fit to narrower formalized definitions, (2) the interplay of these systems and events is complicated and belies simple solutions and linear trajectories, and (3) sociostructural forces including ableism, racism, sexism, and classism shape how people experience these phenomena. These events are fundamentally associated with one another and with their broader structural context, and one framework by which they can be understood is that of neoliberal structural violence. The author suggests several counterhegemonic policies and practices to combat this, including housing decommodification and values-based advocacy, transparency and personalization including case-based decision-making, strengths-based interventions that center firsthand knowledge and focus on changing oppressive practices and implementing categorical resource provision, and antiracist practices that recognize systemic bias. The language of comprehensive collateral consequences provides a scaffold for identifying a range of tangible downstream-to-upstream interventions. Areas for further study include more granular analysis of the phenomena of study (street versus sheltered homelessness; various types of criminal charges; monetary versus nonmonetary evictions) and their impact on particular populations (including Black and BIPOC persons, women, transgender persons).