American social policy often involves pendulum swings driven by changes in public morals, passionate advocacy or legal standards.
A section of the homeless encampment under the Casco Bay Bridge near Commercial Street in Portland on Nov. 9. Brianna Soukup/Staff Photographer
Portland, like many other cities right now, is living a gravity-defying swoop, visible in the encampments of people without shelter. People outside increased nearly fourfold to more than 300 in seven months.
As encampments have grown, so has debate over whether the community should embrace an extreme – maximizing unsheltered people’s choice of where and how to live – or whether Portland should continue to maintain a social contract that holds that every person belongs indoors.
While Portland’s leaders recently opted for the latter, and while Portlanders overwhelmingly chose mayoral candidates opposing the expansion of encampments, those pushing a hard swing toward individual liberty over community concern remain committed.
Others have discussed persistent misrepresentations of recent court decisions outside of Maine and detailed why and how bringing everyone indoors is within Portland’s reach. This is my perspective.
Many if not most people living in the encampments struggle with untreated substance use disorder and/or mental health issues. A minority engage in seriously harmful criminal conduct.
This year I’ve reviewed reports involving domestic violence, other violent confrontations, rampant theft, sexual assault and troubling instances involving people experiencing severe mental health challenges endangering themselves and others within and beyond the encampments.
I’ve met with numerous recently unsheltered people detailing routine coercion into demeaning sex acts in exchange for drugs, safety and basic needs. We have reports of area young people dropping by encampments to buy drugs and allegations of predators using drugs to entice vulnerable people – usually women – into traumatic encounters elsewhere.
Encampments reinforce an environment where even people longing to address their substance use disorder and mental health issues are enabled into delay, sinking them deeper into despair. When help is offered, people steeped in substance use disorder are frequently unable to make choices in their own interest.
Substance use disorder alters the brain, preventing clear-eyed decisions and interfering with the capacity to envision a future. Anyone who has tried to break a habit knows it’s hard.
As a prosecutor in a treatment court setting, and in my personal experience, I know that addiction is uniquely pernicious, especially combined with untreated mental health conditions. Even people highly motivated to change struggle without external standards assisting them to persist, until they can embrace their fundamental worthiness to well-being. Yet people who embark upon their path from almost unimaginably dark places do recover, empowering themselves and others along the way.
Timed as Boston and New York City act to close encampments, expansion here will overwhelm Portland’s capacity to keep people safe or provide needed support to the vast majority who are capable of lives of connection and recovery. And notwithstanding the idealism of libertarians, encampments are inconsistent with the broader community’s safety and use of shared spaces. Eighty gallons of sharps – a needle’s metal end – were recently removed from Marginal Way.
Should we give people who are demonstrably unable to make healthy choices greater freedom to make dangerous ones? Or should we instead hold firm to a compassionate social contract, in the certainty that everyone deserves and is almost certainly capable of a life of greater connection and community?
Shouldn’t we put our efforts into demanding the resources people need to achieve their potential?
It is dehumanizing to ignore the persistent harms being visited upon people without shelter. It is demeaning – and dangerous – to accept substance use disorder as if it is a terminal diagnosis rather than a treatable medical condition. And it would be wrong to sentence our most vulnerable to tents in the cold and dark and call that freedom, as if they are incapable or unworthy of achieving genuine freedom: freedom from harm, uncontrolled substance use and unaddressed mental health.
Let us embrace the full humanity and capacity of each person to be safe, warm and supported.
That begins by bringing people indoors.
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