story and photo by Cathleen Williams
Freedom of movement is a fundamental right of residents on American soil. The right extends to all, including people who live outside on our streets and open public spaces.
It’s a bedrock principle, embedded in our consciousness and our culture, deeper than any law or legal decision. In a 1958 Supreme Court decision, Justice William O. Douglas phrased it this way:
“Freedom of movement across frontiers in either direction, and inside frontiers as well, was a part of our heritage . . . . It may be as close to the heart of the individual as the choice of what he eats, or wears, or reads. Freedom of movement is basic in our scheme of values…”
As Justice Douglas observed in a 1972 case, freedom involves independence, self-confidence, a sense of creativity. It is, in fact, essential to “the right of dissent…the right to be nonconformists and the right to defy submissiveness, [encouraging] lives of high spirits rather than hushed, suffocating silence.” Now, these very rights, which members of marginalized communities enjoy, are in peril.
The Old Poor Farms
For centuries, profit-driven early capitalists built filthy, cold, crowded ramshackle dormitories for poor people where labor was compulsory. They were called “work houses,” “poor houses” or “poor farms.” The economic revolutions of industrialization broke up peasant livelihoods, took the land, and drove masses of dispossessed people into industrial centers. They were not allowed to loiter. The ruling class of that day forced any one who seemed “idle” or “vagrant” into these locked facilities. They forced them to work. As journalist Erin Blakemore wrote, “These facilities were designed to punish people for their poverty and, hypothetically, make being poor so horrible that people would continue to work at all costs.”
The class war of the Victorian age has persisted through the 20th and 21st centuries. Until the 1940’s, Los Angeles maintained a vast poor farm where old and disabled workers were locked up, put to work, and punished with abuse.
Expulsion
Today’s powerful billionaire class is moving ever more rapidly toward imprisonment of the poor, initiating “a sweeping campaign to make homelessness itself a crime.” The highly technological digital automated economy of the 21st century has displaced millions of working-class people, disproportionately people of color. They cannot pay the rents that are increasingly demanded as the price of a home.
This poverty, a sign of vast and widening wealth inequality, results in expulsion of many workers from living space. Once evicted and expelled from housing, they risk breaking the law if they live outside on private, and even public, land.
According to one expert, expulsion isn’t limited to physical space alone. Social scientist Saskia Sassen points out that “low-income workers and the unemployed [have been expelled] from government social welfare and health programs as well as from corporate insurance and unemployment support.”
The New Poor Farms
As president, Donald Trump now leads the billionaire class and represents its interests. In July, he issued Executive Order 14321, which calls for unhoused people to be forcibly transported into camps on cheap land far from cities. The new poor farm is here.
Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah is only too happy to oblige, and the state has now proposed a detention campus for some 1,300 unhoused folks on the outskirts of Salt Lake City, miles from the nearest bus stop. “Stern measures” will be used to arrest and sweep unhoused folks from the street. Then “beds” in the facility will be “offered” to unhoused folks as an alternative to jail. Nearly two thirds will be placed there involuntarily for “psychiatric” or “substance abuse” “treatment.” The remainder will be required to live in “work-conditioned housing” where forced labor is envisioned as a means for “rehabilitation” and “moral development.” It will cost untold millions. Its promoters are in a position to profit.
“Freedom Is A Constant Struggle”
Utah’s plans follow a high-cost push to incarcerate working-class people who have lost their housing across the country. For example, in California homeless-related arrests have soared since the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Grants Pass v. Johnson case, which lifted any restraints on the police.
In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom brought to fruition “CARE courts” as a means of removing unhoused and mentally disabled people from the street. Under the law, CARE courts may enforce involuntary treatment of schizophrenia or related conditions. As of 2024, only a handful of potential cases—42 in San Francisco alone—have already cost tens of millions of dollars without creating any services or housing.
Last year, California voters approved Proposition 36, known as the “Homelessness, Theft Reduction, and Drug Addiction Act”, creating a new category of crimes labeled “treatment felonies.” The claim on the ballot was that certain offenders charged with drug offenses and other minor crimes like petty theft could opt for “treatment” instead of jail or prison. Statewide, only 771 people have been ordered to treatment under Prop 36, out of a reported 8,895 cases. The availability of quality treatment is minimal.
According to one jail reform expert, Claire Simonich from the Vera Project, “It promised mass treatment, but instead, the increased incarceration rates are siphoning local funding” from existing programs that help people, and have been proven effective in keeping them out of jail.
Justice Douglas long ago pointed out that freedom is fundamental to our society, especially freedom of movement.. Without it, as he said, we are doomed to lives of “hushed, suffocating silence.” It’s a sentiment that Jessica, a Street Sheet vendor who lives outside in Sacramento, agrees with.
“I cannot live without freedom,” Jessica says. “And I will not live without freedom. I will stand my ground.”
