United States | Sleeping rough

Is ticketing homeless people a cruel and unusual punishment?

The question has confounded western cities. The Supreme Court will weigh in

Homeless encampment in San Francisco, California.
John Roberts’s next casePhotograph: Getty Images
|Los Angeles

IN 2013 local leaders in Grants Pass, Oregon, held a meeting to brainstorm ideas for how to tackle the city’s growing “vagrancy problem”. A record of that meeting states that participants suggested “driving repeat offenders out of town and leaving them there”, and buying homeless people a bus ticket to anywhere else. “The point”, said Lily Morgan, a city-council member, “is to make it uncomfortable enough for them in our city so they will want to move on down the road.”

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This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “Sleeping rough”

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