When Corporal Acts Are Labeled Criminal: Lack of Privacy among the Homeless

Abstract

This paper concerns homelessness and its strained relation to personal privacy. The homeless, by and large, have no access to truly private spaces they can lay legitimate claim to—places where they will not be potentially harassed or seen by the public or the police. In this paper, I illustrate some of the experiences the homeless have had while lacking privacy, the ways they adjust to and cope with the loss of privacy, and their attempts to find privacy, however temporarily. In addition, the relations between legality and homeless living are explored alongside some discussion of the homeless shelter system and how people that have stayed in shelters often view it. The methodology implemented in the study involved face-to-face contact and the use of a semi-structured instrument of interview questions concerning the lived experiences encountered by homeless individuals living on the streets in Anaheim and Fullerton in southern California. The direct evidence from the study suggests that many homeless individuals have their reasons for disliking homeless shelters, that their public experiences are inevitably trying and uncomfortable, and that public and police surveillance of their daily activities pose a sort of omnipresent threat to their privacy, possessions and even their bodies. And this threat is of a kind that they have minimal, if any, means to circumvent. I conclude with an examination of the kind of policy—Housing First—that is the best social tool we collectively have, so far, for reducing the number of actively homeless persons.