Herring is an assistant professor of sociology at UCLA, co-author of an amicus brief in Johnson v. Grants Pass and a member of the Scholars Strategy Network.
In late June, the Supreme Court decided in the case of Johnson v. Grants Pass that the government can criminalize homelessness. In the court’s 6-3 decision, split along ideological lines, the conservative justices ruled that bans on sleeping in public when there are no shelter beds available do not violate the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
This ruling will only make homelessness worse. It may also propel U.S. localities into a “race to the bottom” in passing increasingly punitive policies aimed at locking up or banishing the unhoused.
Like many West Coast localities, the town of Grants Pass, Ore., suffers from an acute affordable housing crisis and no homeless shelters for adults. In 2013, the city council hosted a meeting to “identify solutions to the current vagrancy problem.” Rather than expanding shelter or housing, the council passed ordinances that made it illegal to sleep outside with blankets, pillows or even cardboard. Every violation triggers a $275 fine, and after two citations a person may be issued an exclusion order across all public property.
This amounts to banishment from Grants Pass or incarceration for simply being homeless. As the city council president at the time said, “The point is to make it uncomfortable enough for them in our city so they will want to move on down the road.”
While the Grants Pass scheme may be uniquely cruel, local governments enforce ordinances against standing, sitting, resting and sleeping in public space across the United States. Now that the minimal guardrails of legal protections for the homeless have been removed by the Supreme Court, it is more important than ever for local lawmakers not to fall prey to populist outrage to ramp up punitive crackdowns. They should instead heed the decades of social science research that shows them to be both counterproductive and cruel.
Synthesizing over 50 published research papers on the impacts of these laws from small towns to large cities, a group of social scientists including myself filed a brief for the Supreme Court in the case. The research consistently arrived at a broad consensus. The enforcement of anti-homeless laws not only fails to reduce homelessness in public space beyond a few blocks, it also traps people in homelessness longer and exacerbates health conditions, all while creating numerous barriers to shelter, treatment, jobs and housing.
Enforcement of anti-homeless laws has been shown to have various negative health impacts. For instance, a 2021 California study of 3,200 adults experiencing homelessness in eight counties found that 36 percent had their belongings taken and/or destroyed by local agencies while enforcing anti-homeless ordinances in just six months. Participants in this study and in other large surveys taken in Denver and Honolulu reported having lost life-saving medicine needed to treat HIV and Hepatitis C, ID and benefit cards, walkers, canes, crutches, and wheelchairs. Meanwhile, CDC scientists acknowledge that clearing encampments through enforcement increases the spread of infectious disease, increasing public health risks.
A study surveying doctors and medical providers identified widespread frustration with enforcement. The houseless regularly avoid appointments or even hospitalization from fear that their property will be destroyed. Many lose benefits and prescriptions due to short incarcerations. All of this leads to negative health impacts, increased emergency room utilization and exorbitant health care costs on already strained systems.
Many people experience incarceration for their first time due to their homelessness, but the consequences have lasting effects. Incarceration often means a loss of employment due to absence and increased difficulty securing new employment stemming from their newly acquired criminal record. The mark of a criminal record also leads to exclusions in the housing market due to landlord discrimination.
Tickets are often viewed as a civil infraction, but they can have the same punitive impacts. Unpaid citations in most U.S. localities result in arrest warrants, spoiled credit, suspensions of driver’s licenses, and erect multiple barriers to exiting homelessness. In San Francisco, a study found that 90 percent of the 10,000 to 15,000 citations given to homeless people each year for sitting, camping or loitering go unpaid — no surprise considering the poverty of those cited.
Not only are those with warrants often barred from work and housing, they are also restricted from residential drug and mental health treatment programs, as well as homeless shelters in many states. Rather than working as sticks to push people towards better life choices and opportunity, studies consistently find that enforcement more often pulls people deeper into poverty and extends their homelessness.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that these laws are ineffective, costly and harmful, they are politically popular. For politicians in power, enforcement reduces public outrage.
Such laws have been consistently found to do nothing to curb wider collective urban disorder or reduce homelessness in public space. But enforcement scratches the itch of individual angry residents and business owners dialing 911 to have their block spot-cleaned of homelessness. Meanwhile, political challengers often campaign on even harsher ordinances, blaming the persistence of homelessness on the incumbent’s tolerance. Both positions distract from the real issue of the growing affordable housing crisis at the problem’s root, which politicians are weary to address.
Even if the Supreme Court had ruled in favor of the homeless plaintiffs, the truth is little would have changed without further political and legal pressure for reforms. And though Friday’s ruling is a huge step backwards, it won’t stop the ongoing legal cases to protect unhoused people’s rights on Fourth, Fifth, and 14th amendment grounds of rights to property, due process and equal access to shelter.
Nonetheless, the court’s decision now frees localities of even the lowest level of accountability in its criminal treatment of homelessness. It will also fuel political competition between cities, counties and even states to pass increasingly punitive policies as they try to push their unhoused residents “down the road.”
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.