Abstract
Since the fourteenth century, countries have sought to criminalize unhoused individuals by labeling them as "vagrants." Currently, the United States and other countries continue to criminalize acts of sleeping rough, begging, loitering and other vagrancy-type activities that disproportionately target unhoused persons. Despite going through a period of decriminalization in the 1960s and 1970s, these punitive measures were largely reinstated by the 1990s. In the most extreme case, vagrancy criminalization was entrenched in a state's constitution. This Note contends that the reversion to punitive measures is triggered by a country's transition to a market-oriented approach that privatizes housing development and de-emphasizes government control over social housing programs. Analyzing England, the United States, Canada, and Hungary as case studies, this Note explores how adopting a market-oriented approach can set off a chain reaction, including a public outcry against homelessness, that culminates in heightened measures to criminalize homelessness. These examples are contrasted with Scotland and Singapore, which, despite also emerging from similar historical contexts of vagrancy laws, do not criminalize homelessness but instead maintain government control of social housing. This comparison demonstrates the impact that a market-oriented approach has on the availability of housing to explain why certain countries criminalize homelessness.
Citation
Gabriella M. Chioffi,
Criminalization of Homelessness:
The Impact of a Market-Oriented
Approach,
35 Duke Journal of Comparative & International Law
171-201
(2025)
Available at: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/djcil/vol35/iss1/4
