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Crime

Criminal law issues feature prominently in the lives of people who are homeless. Preliminary analysis of the Law and Justice Foundation’s Legal Needs Survey 2003 suggests that nearly twice the number of homeless people who responded to the survey had experienced a criminal legal problem compared with housed respondents.¹⁷⁴ At Shopfront, a legal service for homeless and disadvantaged young people under the age of 25, 64% of matters dealt with related to criminal court matters and criminal advice, while a further 6% related to fines.¹⁷⁵

Shopfront is situated in inner-city Sydney. Young homeless people in this region are likely to have been homeless for longer periods of time, moving between sleeping rough, boarding houses and emergency accommodation in a state of chronic homelessness. People at this stage, whether they are young or older people, are highly marginalised from society, may have drug and alcohol and mental health issues and are more likely to have had interactions with the police and the justice system.¹⁷⁶

The criminal law issues they face reflect their living situation: public transport fines and street offences are a result of them being particularly visible to police and other enforcement officers responsible for regulating the use of public space; drug and alcohol-related crime, assault, and theft. Their interaction with the criminal law should be viewed within its context of serious homelessness. It is the last point on the spectrum of legal issues facing homeless people, spanning issues affecting them as they enter into homelessness to those affecting them once they have become entrenched in homelessness.

Fines

Participants and stakeholder consultations for the current study indicated that fines¹⁷⁷ were a major problem for many homeless people who, because of their lack of private housing and economic disadvantage, were more likely to be publicly visible. They consequently accrue multiple fines for street offences such as drinking in public spaces and public transport fines.

Train tickets now only go till 4 am the next morning. People sleeping on the train can then get fined for having an invalid ticket (caseworker).¹⁷⁸

Consultations suggested that young homeless people are particularly susceptible to receiving fines.¹⁷⁹ Sanders notes that while young people aged 15 to 24 years constitute only 14% of the population in NSW, in 2002 14 to 24 year olds received approximately 35% of fines.¹⁸⁰ One homeless young woman recounted her experience:

One of them [a fine] was issued when I was mentally unstable at the time, and I ran across the train tracks without using the train bridge, so they issued me a fine … Well, after the first fine when I ran across the train tracks, I got another one, for smoking on the platform.¹⁸¹

Further, homeless people may be unable to afford to pay the original fine, or, without a regular address, they may not receive notification of the fine. As penalties and interest are added to the original fines, homeless people accumulate fine-related debt.

I’ve had one fine that was really ironic actually. I went to jail in March, but I was supposed to be at jury duty on the 16th, and I didn’t know about it. And I got fined. I said, ‘How come I get picked for jury duty with my criminal background?’ We’re still arguing about that at the moment. I’m doing it directly with them, just arguing at the moment. It was a small fine at the time, but I was in jail for almost four years, and the interest added up. It was $1600 when I got out of jail.¹⁸²

The accumulation of fine-related debt may compound people’s financial disadvantage while homeless. This in turn, makes it harder for homeless people to pay off their fines. Furthermore, failure to pay a fine can lead to further legal problems. For example, once a fine is issued it is referred to the Infringement Processing Bureau. If it remains unpaid it is then referred to the State Debt Recovery Office (SDRO), which issues a fine enforcement order. If, after 28 days following the issue of a fine enforcement order no arrangements have been made to pay the fine, the SDRO may direct the Roads and Traffic Authority (RTA) to suspend a person’s licence, prevent a person from re-applying for their licence, or cancel the person’s licence after six months has passed.¹⁸³ Given their financial disadvantage, homeless people who have incurred fines may be at risk of having their licence cancelled as a result of not paying a fine. This was identified as an issue by a homeless participant:

I was in Byron and I got a littering fine. And I didn’t even litter. I don’t think so. We were camping. And so I owe money to them and it keeps going up and I can’t afford to pay it and they cancelled my licence.¹⁸⁴

Suspension of a licence is a particular problem for homeless people living in rural and regional areas with limited access to public transportation. Furthermore, if people continue to drive while they do not have a licence, this may place them at risk of being charged with an offence and/or accumulating more fines. In turn, this may place people at risk of going to jail.

We do quite a lot of work with fines and … the problem … is that it’s not just the amount of the fines which escalate but the consequences of those. It goes off to State Debt Recovery Office and they whack on another 50 bucks on the fine towards costs. Can’t pay that. A little bit down the track the driving licence gets suspended and … and then they still can’t pay it but they just drive anyway. [He] inevitably gets picked up for driving while suspended. He’d cop another fine for that and then you know again you’re disqualified and you know we certainly get clients where jail suddenly becomes a prospect very quickly because they just keep driving and often for rational reasons that they can’t pay.¹⁸⁵

One of the issues then was that the client was being banned from driving and they were from different states as well. She wanted to try and clear them all and start working on it so that she could clear her name so the process of getting them all into you know into NSW so they could be dealt with here, that couldn’t be done. She couldn’t pay the fines in NSW for Victoria and then also they wouldn’t accept small payments. I mean she’s on welfare so if she was willing to say ‘I can pay x amount a fortnight until I’ve paid it off’… But they said no you’ve got to pay it all. So she’s constantly running. She’s trying to do the right thing. It’s impossible for her and at the end of the day it will be a jail sentence when we looked into it and then often people go into jail for a minor thing like that and come out more traumatised because of incidents in the inside which is then, they come out going, well either way I’ve got no hope, so they lose faith in the whole system if they ever had any.¹⁸⁶

Because of their greater public visibility and economic disadvantage, homeless people are vulnerable to incurring fines. Their financial disadvantage makes it difficult for them to pay off their fines, resulting in the accumulation of penalties and interest to the original fine. This in turn makes it harder for homeless people to pay off the original fine, which can have serious consequences such as cancellation of a person’s licence. Thus, not only does homelessness increase the risk of incurring a fine, it may also lead to a person being more vulnerable to the consequences of not paying a fine.

‘Move on’ powers

Under s 28F of the Summary Offences Act 1988 (NSW), police have the power to ask a person to ‘move on’ in certain situations, for instance if a person is seen to be ‘intimidating or obstructing another person’.¹⁸⁷ Because homeless people, particularly at primary levels of homelessness, spend much of their time in the public space, they are highly visible to police. Homeless participants, particularly those who sleep rough in parks, bus stops and other public spaces, commonly report being asked to ‘move on’ by police:

The other day police approached me, told me I had to move, said I was taking up too much space. First time [this happened]. ‘How am I taking up too much space?’ He said, ‘You’re fine to stand there, you just can’t sit there.’ I just left, I just couldn’t handle it. I went and sat in Hyde Park for a couple of hours to try and make sense of it.¹⁸⁸

Sometimes when we would be waiting for a food van, the coppers would get a bit narky and ask us to move on.¹⁸⁹

As a result, a couple of people commented on the need to ‘travel around’ to avoid the police moving them on:

Sometimes when you sleep out the police will come and move us on and there are just not enough places to sleep around the area and when they move you on you either have to stay up all night or you find somewhere else to sleep or if it is raining you can’t sleep in the laneway or down in x Park down over there. They sleep over there. Or down the back behind the wine cellar. Or we sleep down in the x carpark. So we travel around a bit at night if we get moved on by the police.¹⁹⁰

I don’t get asked to move on—I do a lot of walking.¹⁹¹

It was also suggested by one stakeholder that homeless people are vulnerable to being told to move not only by police, but also security guards and council rangers.¹⁹² However, few of the homeless people we consulted reported much contact with either group.

Another stakeholder stated that homeless people are also more likely to be the targets of rigorous policing practices, getting checked for outstanding warrants and searched for drugs.¹⁹³ This is further corroborated by the following comments by two homeless participants interviewed for this study:

The only other problem I had was when I was in Melbourne. I was living on the streets. The police would often hassle me and check my history or do warrant checks. When I threatened to put them up for harassment they got more narky and tried to intimidate me. If anything, it made me more determined. It wasn’t just me, it was others on the street as well that they were harassing. I just had the balls to take them on.¹⁹⁴

No, the police have this thing about harassing homeless people on the street, like I will be walking and I had my bags with me and they pulled me up and searched me, just because I looked like a hobo, like a drug addict and I found that really insulting.¹⁹⁵

And as one caseworker describes it, what starts as being moved on may progress to being searched for drugs. If a person has had a number of charges, the situation can become quite serious.

And so something that started from just trying to I suppose move people on from the neighbourhood because they’re loitering is turning into like clients being charged for really minor, minor charges. But you usually find that they probably had a string of them over the last couple of months which actually turns into more serious charges. It might be going from possession to not paying fines to things like that. And going into being incarcerated over just a build up of simple issues like that.¹⁹⁶

Relationships with police are discussed in further detail in Chapter 7.

Drug-related criminal activity

Perhaps reflecting the high rates of drug and other alcohol abuse among people who have been chronically homeless (see Chapter 3), stakeholders and participants indicated that a small number of homeless people commit drug-related crimes.¹⁹⁷ Offences range from possession of and selling drugs to offences arising from the need to obtain income to buy drugs, such as prostitution, theft, break and enter and assault.

Yeah, I got charged a while back [in 2000]. I got charged for car [theft], assault and GBH and that. I was in for two and a half months. And then rehab for three months.¹⁹⁸

Thus, homeless people as a group are more likely to encounter the law than other groups because of their greater involvement in illicit drug-taking. Further, their lack of financial resources may also mean that homeless people use illegal means to get sufficient money to support their addiction.