The Crimes of the Homeless or the Crime of Homelessness by by Barak and Bohm (1989)

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At the bottom of this page there is a link to the journal Crime, Law and Social Change (you gotta pay to!)


Abstract

This paper is a limited attempt to synthesize the older and newer trends in radical criminology — to integrate the issues of criminalization, decriminalization, and victimization. The object of our endeavor is homelessness and how society responds to it. In the paper, we first examine the dialectics of criminalization, homelessness, and economic crisis in relation to some of the general trends in the developing political economy of welfare capitalism. Second, we argue that criminologists should support and focus on effort to ldquocriminalizerdquo the condition of homelessness and, at the same time, to decriminalize most of the acts of survival of the homeless. In pursuing this end, we urge criminologists to respond by doing things ldquowithrdquo rather than ldquoforrdquo or ldquotordquo the homeless. Ultimately, we hope this paper contributes to the ideological and practical struggle for achieving stable institutional methods for satisfying basic human needs.


http://www.springerlink.com/content/xt5442371jk34821/



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