On Jail, part I: Warehousing the Rabble

The following is from the beginning of John Irwin's classic study of jail existence, The Jail, published in 1986 and still considered relevant and keenly insightful. The blockquote is a rather long chunk of text – sorry 'bout that – but I believe worthy of your attention.

In a legal sense, the jail is the point of entry into the criminal justice system. It is the place where arrested persons are booked and where they are held for their court appearances if they cannot arrange bail. It is also the city or country detention facility for persons serving misdemeanor sentences, which in most states cannot exceed one year. The prison, on the other hand, is a state or federal institution that holds persons serving felony sentences, which generally run to more than one year.

The public impression is that the jail holds a collection of dangerous criminals. But familiarity and close inspection reveal that the jail holds only a very few persons who fit the popular conception of a criminal – a predator who seriously threatens the lives and property of ordinary citizens. In fact, the great majority of the persons arrested and held in jail belong to a different social category. Some students of the jail have politely referred to them as the poor: "American jails operate primarily as catchall asylums for poor people." Some have added other correlates of poverty: "With few exceptions, the prisoners are poor, under-educated, unemployed, and they belong to minority groups." Some use more imaginative and sociologically suggestive labels, such as "social refuse" or "social junk." Political radicals sometimes use "lumpen proletariat" and argue over whether its members are capable of participating in the class struggle. Some citizens refer to persons in this category as "street people," implying an excessive and improper public presence. others apply such labels as "riffraff," "social trash," or "dregs," which suggest lack of social worth and moral depravity. And many police officers, deputies, and other persons who are familiar with the jail population use more crudely derogatory labels, such as "assholes" and dirt balls."

In my own research, I found that beyond poverty and its correlates – under- education, unemployment, and minority status – jail prisoners share two essential characteristics; detachment and disrepute. They are detached because they are not well integrated into conventional society, they are not members of conventional social organizations, they have few ties to conventional social networks, and they are carriers of unconventional values and beliefs. They are disreputable because they are perceived as irksome, offensive, threatening, capable of arousal, even protorevolutionary. In this book I shall refer to them as the rabble, meaning the "disorganized" and "disorderly," the "lowest class of people."

I found that it is these two features – detachment and disrepute – that lead the police to watch and arrest the rabble so frequently, regardless of whether or not they are engaged in crime, or at least in serious crime. (Most of the rabble commit petty crimes, such as drinking on the street, and are usually vulnerable to arrest.)

These findings suggest that the basic purpose of the jail differs radically from the purpose ascribed to it by government officials and academicians. It is this: the jail was invented, and continues to be operated, in order to manage society's rabble. Society's impulse to manage the rabble has many sources, but the subjectively perceived "offensiveness" of the rabble is at least as important as any real threat it poses to society.

From my experience – a year in Homeless World Sacramento and forty days in Sacramento county jails – I believe Irwin is right, except that the radical fringe has withered and there are no longer protorevolutionaries in our midst.

I do believe, whether it is overt or blithering, a lot of effort is made in Sacramento to hide or impair the homeless in jails and in VOA's terrible Winter Shelter (an extra-legal jail) that violates people's freedom and keeps good people from re-entering polite society. It is a tragedy; something straight out of Chuck Dickens and Vic Hugo. [Oliver Twist and Les Miserables]

It is all especially sad because leaders in our homeless-help organizations are participants [albeit unwitting, I hope] in keeping the underclass corralled and under thumb and eerily tranquilized.

The first-person dimension of homeless Sacramentans suffering from Schizophrenia

"Disabilities and dysfunction process from having been shunned and denied access to needed opportunitites and networks of support."
~ the brothers Lysaker in Schizophrenia and the Fate of the Self

What is schizophrenia? How many are homeless Sacramentans?

Perhaps 15% of the Sacramento homeless population suffers from schizophrenia. The percentage is difficult to determine for many reasons that branch from both the fuzzy definition of the malady and that many people within the homeless community who have the illness (1) are in denial and are undiagnosed and (2) have the illness as a diagnosis only – the disability can be faked by people who are successful claimants of social security and other benefits.

What is schizophrenia? One webspace gives us this definition: The most chronic and disabling of the severe mental disorders. Typically develops in the late teens or early twenties. The overt symptoms are hallucinations (hearing voices, seeing visions), delusions (false beliefs about commonly held views of reality) and bizarre thought patterns. Another webspace adds this: Psychosis characterized by the breakdown of integrated personality functioning, withdrawal from reality, emotional blunting and distortion, and disturbances in thought and behavior

According to a study by Amador, et al, "Awareness of Illness in Schizophrenia and Schizoaffective and Mood Disorders" in the Oct 94 issue of General Psychiatry, between a third and two-thirds who have the malady deny or are unaware they have the mental illness.

According to Dr. Joseph Pierre's commentary in the Feb 2009 issue of Psychiatric Times, "What do you mean, I don't have schizophrenia?":

...in my patients' world – and in the wake of the Contract With America Advancement Act of 1996 – a diagnosis of schizophrenia is one of the best ways to gain access to a disability income and other social services that are unavailable for those who "only" have a substance use disorder ... [M]y patients were far from relieved when I "took away" their schizophrenia diagnosis or an antipsychotic medication. On the contrary, their very existence was threatened.

Viewed from this perspective, I realized that malingering, if present, was often [caused by the medical establishment] – incentivized by increasingly restrictive criteria for disability incomes or access to care that characterize addiction as a lifestyle choice. I'd find myself thinking of Jean Valjean: given existing conditions, who wouldn't steal the loaf of bread as a simple act of survival?

Thus in homeless communities in America, there are many undiagnosed schizophrenics, and many with other problems but who get a schizophernia diagnosis but don't have the malady.

The number of homeless in Sacramento who are schizophrenic is approximately 420. But this educated guess could be off by a hundred or more, either up or down.

Blunted affect and diological self

The medications that schizophrenics take will relieve their hallucinations and delusions and bizarre thinking to great extent, but do little for the emotional blunting and withdrawl. Schizophrenics faithfully keeping up their medication regimen will be placid and unnoticed, but from their experience, they are alienated nothings.

From the book Schizophrenia and the Fate of the Self:

... blunted affect ... generally refers to a lack of emotional expression in inflection, expression and gesture. A person described as having blunted affect would show a limited range of emotions, perhaps appearing wooden or lifeless in the midst of a celebration or a time of sadness. In contrast to a drepressed person who might silently be consumed by pain, someone with flat affect would feel emptiness. If confronted with something painful, pleasurable, surprising, or disgusting a person with flat affect would show the same emotional response: nothing. ...

[As an example, one schizophrenic, Glass, describes his experience thus:] Glass tells us that he is in a cloudbank, suggesting a hazy, undifferentiated state within which direction is elusive. Moreover, none of the events wherein his life unfolds produces any particular effect in him, as if each self-world interaction were just more mist and vapor, including his own role therein.

When one becomes fully emotionally flat like this, it disrupts one's sense of self. You have nothing to animate your character. Internally, for the schizophrenic, there is nothing to stir him to converse with others. But the schizophrenic does suffer from a sense of "nothing," feeling as if he is barely there and fading away.

Without an animating self, there is a lack of volition. There is simply nothing to compel one to pursue any particular course of action in a day.

It should be of no surprise, then, that the most common cause of death for a person with schizophrenia is suicide.

Problems for schizophrenics who are unaware of their illness

From Schizophrenia and the Fate of the Self:

Imagine having a vague sense that one was faring less well than before, but maintaining the belief that the likely symptom of and thus key to one's diminishment was irrelevant to one's situation. Presuming one's assessment was mistaken, one would continue to fare poorly, and perhaps waste time addressing unrelated situations. This is precisely the kind of scenario we think occurs when people lack insight into, or an awareness of the symptoms associated with schizophrenia - the dialogical compromises they affect continue unabated. The point is not simply that such folk are unlikely to seek help, but also that their lack of awareness prevents the development of a meta-position, for example, self-as-ill, which could help them interpret and thus delimit the influence of the unusual experiences and/or beliefs they find themselves having.

Lack of insight into one's condition is also likely to intensify social alienation. Without a plausible account of one's trouble, it would be nearly impossible to talk to others about one's experiences and the difficulties that often surround them.

... If dialogical breakdowns lead to a sense of self as diminished, and particularly with regard to one's agency, awareness of illness could be overwhelming. ... one of our [the authors'] central claims is that sense of self derives from interanimating play of self-positions. As that play proves increasingly disordered, sense of self will suffer, finding little to hold onto besides its diminishment. ... the thought that one is nothing but diminishment can be devastating. So it may be that a refusal to see one's symptoms as sympoms allows one a sense of self that is disoriencted and diminished, but at least not the nothingness that seemed to loom on the edges of paranoia.

Sorry, kind readers, for posting such a big block of text, but what's written here is important, I think.

In layman's terms from what I glean from the above: People, generally, use a lot of their energy trying to cope with and cover up their deficits. But for the large number of schizophrenics who are undiagnosed and unaware of their mental illness, things are triply bad. They can lose the ability to have a meta-position with respect to their self. [A meta-position, as I understand it, is how you fluidly present yourself as your interactions with others change during the course of short-range spans of time.] Not having access to more-resolved meta-positions, schizophrenics can be prone to more delusional thinking, and that leads to greater social alienation.

The authors believe that successful, orderly and accepted "play" between the different selves we each have makes us "normal." A schizophrenic experiences a sense of failure in transactions with others, disorder and unacceptance. Thus, there is a downward spiral toward feelings of disorientation, alienation and "nothingness." At this stage, a schizophrenic person might experience himself as disembodied.

Psychosocial rehabilitation

In a final, very short few paragraphs at the end of their book, the brothers Lysaker write about "pychosocial rehabilitation." They suggest vocational programs for supported employment; peer support and guidance and case management.

Also, the brothers are keen on creating social situations for schizophrenic people that elicit and support self-positions such that sense of self is celebrated and stabalized.
-----

Helpful links:

Glossary Of Schizophrenia Terminology
Schizophrenia and the Fate of the Self at amazon
Schizophrenia and the Fate of the Self at Oxford University Press

Who the Sacramento Homeless really are

Following is an opinion piece I submitted to the Sacramento Bee on April 7 – which, from their non-response, I learned they had chosen not to publish it. I found a copy of it in my backpack, today, and thought Gee, this is pretty good; I should let readers of my blog read it. And so, here it is.

Who the Sacramento Homeless Really Are, and
How Best to Help Them. Guidance from an Insider.

How can you a wealthy or, at least, well-off or working person in the Sacramento metropolis, best help the homeless in our area whom you've heard so much about, recently, and whom you care about and worry about!?

Ahhhh, that's sweet. Compassion is a wonderful thing! As the Dalai Lama is credited with saying: "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion." And as Jesus emphasized, according to the Bible: "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

We homeless are your neighbors. This is something I have learned in my near-year out in Homeless World Sac. We homeless are remarkably like you, though not in the way news coverage has described things in recent months, during the post-Oprah media blitz.

We are not in overwhelmingly number cowering, broken Caucasian families, unaccustomed to not having the wherewithal to tool around on the freeways in our SUVs.

Most of us are solo men, and of these, we are disproportionately black. Certainly, there are women and boys and girls and couples and families, too, that are out there on the streets, living in tents, and staying in shelters. The variety of people is as broad as the general population. If you look, you'll find a near-doppelganger of yourself or your family in Homeless World Sac.

But, indeed, a great great many homeless folk have substance-abuse issues. And maybe a past that includes large swatches of time being locked up for bad, and sometimes terrible or monstrous, deeds.

Many, many homeless have debilitating mental-health issues and have been dumped by society. Of these people, many talk to themselves and do not converse with others.

Many homeless are as wholly self-interested and inured to others' problems as AIG executives. They feign sympathy; habitually, effortlessly lie; and play mind-games.

But savaged with problems or not, you will find, among the homeless, in greater proportion than in the general population, people with mighty hearts and kind natures – folks who are likable, lovable, thoughtful and as generous as they can be. Not surprisingly, Jesus was homeless [Matt 8:20], as was Buddha. And as are saints [like St. Francis and Margaret of Cortona] and bodhisattvas [like Layman Pang and Noah Yuttadhammo].

A lot of how homeless people are depicted is flat-out false. We are not whiny and morose, as we seem always to be on the news, or can seem to be on some homeless-advocacy websites. The homeless community, by and large, is cheerful and resolute to hold on and make do.

There's a lot more money in Homeless World Sac than I would ever have supposed before landing here. A great many of the guys get monthly disability checks – which some call "happy checks" – in an amount just short of $900. That is the prime source funding the considerable use of substances to alter consciousness or otherwise have a spree early in the month. Shelter space for men frees up very very noticeably early in a month, going from "insufficient to meet demand" to 20% empty beds.

Why society gives so much money to "disabled"* people so that they can make themselves more disabled and shorten their lives, I don't understand. I wonder if things might change if people better knew what was going on.

And, finally, the homeless are not a bunch of Maynard G. Krebses, squealing "Work!" and running away. We line up for temporary work in Friendship Park, hoping something will come of it. We take whatever jobs we can, certainly including what's offered under-the-table. Guys work for small businesses doing telephone soliciting; putting up drywall; selling insurance on commission; waving signs on the sidewalk; working high-traffic hours at restaurants. Some of us recycle cans and bottles that the general population tosses out their car windows, and are Johnny-on-the-spot to help people move furniture or plant petunias.

How YOU can best help those most in
need in Homeless World Sacramento

Most of the homeless in Sacramento are die-hard fans of the homeless-aid and -advocacy programs in The Community. Me, I'm more of a curmudgeon and a critic.

Loaves & Fishes is Homeless World Sac townsquare to the homeless folk in our metropolis, and to those who grumble when they pass by it on light rail on their way to work. It's where about six hundred people get a free lunch each day and might spend an hour or two in its park or library. The affection homeless people have for Loaves – as it's nicknamed – is considerable, based on the view that, absent the facility, their lives would be downgraded to dumpster diving and great unhappiness.

Me, I'm a critic of Loaves, questioning its policies and efficiency in its use of funds. But I'm sympathetic to the mutual-dependency that Loaves and the homeless community are locked in. If Marcos Breton writes something hateful about the homeless, Loaves takes a hit in its fundraising and who knows how often meatloaf will start appearing on the menu and what leftovers the kitchen staff might need to put in it; If Loaves is lauded by Oprah Winfrey, we homeless might see nice, tasty, healthy food, served to us under the twinkling lights of international newcasts' TV cameras.

So should someone wanting to help the homeless do the simple thing, write a check to Loaves & Fishes, or another homeless-aid agency, like Volunteers of America or Union Gospel Mission or the Salvation Army or WIND Youth Services? Sure. If your time is valuable, one of those organizations is likely to squeeze a lot of good out of whatever you can send.

But if you can spend some time to target your money to really, really make it do good, here are my insider ideas: End-around bureaucracies and administration and get the homeless what they most need.

What do we need? Vegetables! There's lots and lots of sugar and starch in Homeless World, but artichokes and asparagus are next to unheard of. See if you can get your grocery store to help you out and sell you some produce that is being taken off the sales floor and GIVE it to you, or sell it to you at a deep discount, which you can GIVE to us!

Broccoli, green beans, asparagus, onions and tomatoes, hooray! If the quantity seems enough to provide a serving to feed a hundred-twenty, take what you collect to Union Gospel Mission [400 Bannon St.; Sacramento]; or, if its a great deal, that will contribute toward feeding 600, then take it to Loaves & Fishes [1300 N. C St.; Sacramento].

Another good idea: Buy Subway sandwich gift cards in the amount of $6 each and pass them out to homeless men and women you see. A Subway sandwich, much more so that McDonald's, say, is packed with plantlife. And Subway franchises, like McDonald'ses, are ubiquitous.

-----
* I put the word in quotes, since it's an open secret that many of these disabled aren't disabled: they've just gotten themselves lawyers who know how to work the system.]

Tom Armstrong has been in Homeless World Sacramento for nearly a year, now. He was made homeless when his sister stole his inheritance and his belongings.

Sac'to Spirituality Examiner focuses on spirituality and homelessness

	Picture of homeless man sleeping on a bench that appeared with the examiner.com article.

Over at examiner.com – a new website that is at the cutting edge of the evolution of newspapers into something very inquisitive and solely online – the Sacramento Spirituality Examiner, Steve Curless, looks at homelessness in our metropolis after the demise of Tent City, in the first of a three-piece report, "Helping the Homeless, Part I."

[Steve credits this blog, and its cousin, Sacramento Homeless Blog, in his report. I met Steve online and colaberated on a blog at one time with him. Since then, we've become pals in meatspace in our shared metropolis.]

In his first part, Steve addresses the distance people leading typical lives have from the homeless and how it can be "an abstraction." But, with the serious recession we've entered in deepening, homelessness becomes up-close and personal. For Steve, his friendship with homeless me has personalized homelessness.

Steve then touches on the difficulties of homeless life and the deficits of homeless-aid organizations meant to serve us.

He writes about Tent City and how it was rousted and made to disappear, at considerable expense, to hide the blight from media attention.

In his next report, Steve intends to look at what "government and privately-funded organizations [can] do to help the homeless, and [if there is] a role for spirituality to play."

I am hopeful readers of this blog will plug in to Steve's and those of other examiners at examiner.com. Certainly, I hope that readers, here, will read the wisdom in Steve's follow-up pieces on homelessness. Steve is a profoundly wise and compassionate fellow.

Homeless Tom in Sacramento News & Review

	Cover of the March 19 issue of SN&R. In the top righthand corner, just beneath FREE, it reads "It's True! Oprah Stole My Story! see Race to the Bottom, page 11

Yowza. There's a piece in today's Sacramento News & Review, in a column called Race to the Bottom that R.V. Scheide writes, titled "The Oprah inside me," where I play a role.

The article begins with this august paragraph:

Tom the homeless Buddhist guy is angry, or as angry as a homeless Buddhist guy can be, which, to be honest, really isn’t all that angry. Bemused might be a better description. At any rate, Tom insists things haven’t been the same since Oprah Winfrey blew through Tent Town. I’m inclined to agree, but for an entirely different reason than his: Oprah stole my story, and I can prove it.

What happened was I had written the alternative weekly newspaper's tip line to pitch a story I thought they should write and things turned out a bit differently than what I had originally hoped.

Actually, I had several ideas for investigative news stories I hoped SN&R would pursue. The Sacramento News & Review is the second most-important hardcopy news source in the metropolis and it hadn't weighed in recently with a boffo story on homelessness, which for bizarre reasons, ignited by Oprah, has quite suddenly become a big local, national and international news-topic extravaganza.

Anyway, R.V. met me in his office last week and we chatted about issues and topics related to Sacramento homelessness generally, and what I hoped the weekly would pursue. My broadest idea for a story was one correcting the conception, that Oprah and others had presented, of a booming illicit tent community emerging in midtown Sacramento, filled with couples and families sleeping in tents after abandoning their foreclosed homes.

Just about everyone in the broad Sacramento homeless community, including homeless-aid agency workers, know that it is a myth that women and families are overwhelming the count of solo men who are homeless. Solo men [single men or men who are separated from their families] continue to constitute the great majority of homeless people and they continue to be the major source of new homeless folk in our metropolis.

There certainly are couples whom have lost a house due to foreclosure in Sacramento's Tent City, but that is rare. And there are families and parts of broken families in shelters, now, but there is not an epidemic of family homeless - yet, anyway.

Most of the news reports follow the Oprah lead and give near-tearful reports of devastated families. Today, for example, at close to 7AM, when Friendship Park was about to open, a film crew was interviewing a couple at the park gate. There was perhaps only that one couple on the scene, in the cul-de-sac, in the midst of a hundred solo men and, maybe, ten women.

Now, both R.V. and I are torn between how this homeless Sac'to story is evolving and what works in the best interest of helping homeless folk getting to where they can have happier, healthier, more-productive lives. Based on his Race to the Bottom piece, you can see that R.V.'s heart is with us homeless and that he would sacrifice a little in-your-face ugliness of the whole truth, all of it, for the narrower story that comes with benefits.

A bit of an aside: A couple short SN&R editorial-board editorials in this-week's edition were on-board with R.V.'s view of things. One, "Six Degrees," talks about the idea of "six degrees of separation" and how, whether we are ourselves suffering in the difficult economic climate or not, someone close to us surely is. That editorial ends with this thought:

It seems the wracked economy is just another reminder that we exist in a web
of humanity that has us all indelibly linked, approaching zero separation.

What to do about it? We'd better take care of each other.

In a sidebar next to the piece it says, "Go to these Web sites to find out how to donate to community members who have been the hardest hit by the economic downturn." Then, the web addresses of Loaves & Fishes, the Salvation Army, and St. John's Shelter are provided.

The second short SN&R editorial, "Tent truths," talks about how all the media hoopla presents Sacramento's tent encampment as a "national symbol of the human results of our failing economy." Here, a central snip from the piece:

If there’s a bright side to all this attention, it’s that it might help push city leaders into doing what’s right for its growing homeless population. We’ve urged the city before in this space to sanction a campground where homeless people can live without fear of being constantly rousted by police and have access to running water, bathrooms and trash collection.

We hereby repeat the request.

In the sidebar next to this editorial it says, "A Safe Ground rally to support a legal campsite for area homeless will be held on Tuesday, April 21, 2 p.m., at the Sacramento state Capitol." The rally is sponsored by Loaves & Fishes.

MY view of things differs from R.V.'s, a bit, maybe. I greatly worry that in this welling up of concern for people whose lives are undermined by the faltering economy, we risk being steared solely by our emotions without benefit of cold, hard, inconvenient facts. I also worry when general-news sources start giving the people what they might want to hear, or what may touch them most directly, instead of giving them unadulterated truths.

I would argue that because of the post-Oprah phenomena re Sac'to homelessness, the public has a skewed idea of what is going on. From international sources [ITN; (UK) Times Online; BBC; BBC radio; Germany, Japan, Australian TV; et al], national sources [NY Times; ABC News; Inside Edition; NPR; the Today Show; et al] and local sources [KCRA; News10; et al], the public is being fed a false overarching conception of what homelessness in Sacramento is like. [I'll fill in the URLs to the 'sources' later, but you readers can find where the news is coming from from this google search, in the meantime.]

I think that general-news sources should strive to give their readers a sense of what the truth out there is. That doesn't mean that general news should not sometimes be "up-close and personal," telling a specific story that might not give an overview of what is happening in a topic area, generally. But, now, because of what general news stories have been presented, the public has an absolutely wrong impression of what homelessness is like in Sacramento. They have been mislead.

The unmitigated truth is almost always - if not always - best in the longrun. Today, there is nothing much that motivates homeless-aid providers to be efficient and to provide fully-compassionate service to the people they are meant to help. Why? Because there is little risk that a prominent news provider will hold their feet to the fire and let the public in on management problems and possible financial shenanigans. And homeless people are, most all of them, so damn grateful for absolutely anything they get, they don't complain. Besides, if you get on the wrong side of homeless-aid providers you may be subjected to getting stinted help, or to be more likely than others of being 86ed from the facility.

Today, homeless-aid providers are getting an "advance to 'Go'; collect $200" card from the press, when, truly, these aid providers are way overdue for scrutiny. Maybe now is not the time for scrutiny, due to the fragility of things in light of the economic tailspin and it still being winter. But, someday, eventually ...

Sac'to Homeless featured on today's Today Show

Here, the vid:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

And, here my piece in Sacramento Homeless about the wave of stories about the Sacramento homeless in Big Media and beyond.

UPDATE: And here, another Today Show segment, a follow-up the next day, an objectivity-be-gone love smooch to Sacramento Loaves & Fishes. Sister Libby Fernandez, CEO of L&F, can be heard, as can the city's major, Kevin Johnson. My good friend T-Bone [aka, New York], as nice a fellow as there is in the world, has a cameo role; he's in the food line, asked by Libby (off camera) what he's doing today. "Going to work, today" he says.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Homeless Lit: Cannery Row

	Cover of the first edition of John Steinbeck's 1945 novel.

This is the first in a series looking at how homelessness is presented in literature. Does fiction present homeless folk realistically? Are we romanticised? Are we presented as scummier, less-wholesome beings than the good people most of us are? Are the homeless people of yore different from what we're like today?

--

"a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream"
-- A description of the street Cannery Row,
from the first sentence in the book.

Cannery Row is the story of many poor and interesting people who live on Cannery Row, a street next to the Pacific Ocean, where many sardine-canning factories stood, in Monterey, California.
A character called Doc is usually identified as the main character in the story, but, truly, the plot of the story results from the many actions of "Mack and the boys," a group of men who are homeless at the beginning of the book, and whom the omnipotent third-person narrator tracks most closely for the whole of the story.
As I say, Mack and the boys are homeless at the beginning, but in Chapter I, they gain possession of a Cannery Row building, thereafter refered to as the Palace Flophouse, where they take up residence without need of paying rent. A solid mass of text describing Mack and the boys concludes Chapter II [emphases, mine]:

Mack and the boys [spin] in their orbits. They are the Virtues, the Graces, the Beauties of the hurried mangled craziness of Monterey and the cosmic Monterey where men in fear and hunger destroy their stomachs in the fight to secure certain food, where men hungering for love destroy everything lovable about them. Mack and the boys are the Beauties, the Virtues, the Graces. In the world ruled by tigers with ulcers, rutted by strictured bulls, scavenged by blind jackals, Mack and the boys dine delicately with the tigers, fondle the frantic heifers, and wrap up the crumbs to feed the sea gulls of Cannery Row. What can it profit a man to gain the whole world and to come to his property with a gastric ulcer, a blown prostate, and bifocals? Mack and the boys avoid the trap, walk around the poison, step over the noose while a generation of trapped, poisoned, and trussed-up men scream at them and call them no-goods, come-to-bad-ends, blots-on-the-town, thieves, rascals, bums. Our Father who art in nature, who has given the gift of survival to the coyote, the common brown rat, the English sparrow, the house fly and the moth, must have a great and overwhelming love for no-goods and blots-on-the-town and bums, and Mack and the boys. Virtues and graces and laziness and zest. Our Father who art in nature.

There's lots of interesting stuff in this paragraph.

First, Steinbeck [as an omnipotent, crotchety third-person narrator] calls Mack and the boys [Mack, Hazel, Eddie, Hughie and Jones] "the Beauties, the Virtues, the Graces." He is refering to the Charities of antiquity. Quoting wikipedia, "In Greek mythology, a Charis (Χάρις) is one of several Charites (Χάριτες; Greek: 'Graces'), goddesses of charm, beauty, nature, human creativity and fertility. They ordinarily numbered three: Aglaea ('Beauty'), Euphrosyne ('Mirth'), and Thalia ('Good Cheer'). In Roman mythology they were known as the Gratiae, the 'Graces.'"
Certainly, the five homeless men friends are very admirable in many ways, as are the biggest subset of the homeless in Sacramento. They are clearly, basically good-hearted and well-meaning and mostly oblivious to their own self-interestedness and destructiveness.
An early tangential story, within the greater story of Mack & boys' efforts to throw a big party for good old Doc, has a lonely watchman, named William, trying to make friends with the five homeless guys. For no particular reason, the homeless guys reject William, and after some other insensitive encounters, William plunges an ice pick into his heart. "It was amazing how easily it went in. William was the watchman before Alfred came. Everybody liked Alfred."
From an unsourced commentary, found online, some wisdom about the 'tragedy within merryment' which repeats in Steinbeck's sad novella:

The symbolism of chaos-and-order is basic to Cannery Row; various characters, each in his own fashion, try to arrange and observe what cannot, in any essential aspect, be changed. As Steinbeck says in one of his "inter-chapters" or digressions, it is the function of The World - of human communication - to create by means of faith and art an Order of love which is mankind's only answer to that fate which all men, and indeed all life, must ultimately share. And if John Steinbeck turns to the "outcasts" from society as symbols for this vision, it may be that only the outcasts of machine civilization can still remember who they truly are.

Once again, even in this most charming of books, Steinbeck recapitulates the themes
so integral to his work: the need of the human animal to organize, to combine for purposes beyond that of the mere individual appetite; the corruption and poison of moral pomposity and insane acquisition; and the loneliness-within-brotherhood of all flesh and mortality.

In Zen terms, the novella hones in on the idea of interbeing [A state of connectedness and interdependence of all phenomena], or, similarly but perhaps better, circuminsessional interpenetration. We all both deflate and delight each other, usually without much awareness of our powers of destruction and our ability to bring joy. We are also oblivious to the realization that each other is all we have and that the one thing we don't have is ourself. [We stupidly, endlessly defend the illusion of ego.]
In the quote from Chap II, Steinbeck writes about "fear and hunger," which is, again, the paired cheribim of "fear and desire" [in the garden of Eden] which destroy us and hold us back, and is what we must overcome to save us. In the rescue mission in Sacramento, fear and desire ["you risk going to hell" and "jesus would love to see you in heaven"] are used to rescue homeless men from the fear and desire ['destitution/meaninglessness/drudgery of the homeless condition' and 'alcohol! drugs! immediate relief!'] outside the rescue-mission property gates. [I would say that instead of swapping one's fear-and-desire for some other set of fear-and-desire, life's purpose is to overcome fear-and-desire, altogether, and -- as with most things that suppress us -- we overcome them by examining them closely and finding them not to be so special or to be a real threat.]
In the novella, Mack and the boys cause a lot of trouble while, mostly, having good intentions. In the wake of their parties and clever adventures, other people's lives are damaged. But, Doc, the book's great good supposedly-responsible character, too, is rather-unintentionally the cause of destruction. A character in the shadows, a retarded lad named Frankie ["Frankie drifted about like a small cloud."], hangs out at Doc's lab. Because he loves Doc, he steals a clock as a present for him. As a result of the theft, Frankie is hauled away to a life in an institution with Doc being rather oblivious to it all.
Late in the book, Doc makes some observations about Mack and the boys to a friend with whom he is drinking some beer and listening to classical music:

Doc said "...Mack and the boys know everything that has ever happened in the world and possibly everything that will happen. I think they survive in this particular world better than other people. In a time when people tear themselves to pieces with ambition and nervousness and covetousness, they are relaxed. All of our so-called successful men are sick men, with bad stomachs, and bad souls, but Mack and the boys are healthy and curiously clean. They can do what they want. They can satisfy their appetites without calling them something else."
and a little later ...
"It has always seemed strange to me," said Doc. "The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second."
"Who wants to be good if he has to be hungry too?" said [Doc's friend].
"Oh, it isn't a matter of hunger. It's something quite different. The sale of souls to gain the whole world is completely voluntary and almost unanimous -- but not quite. Everywhere in the world there are Mack and the boys. I've seen them in an ice-cream seller in Mexico and in an Aleut in Alaska. You know how they tried to give me a party and something went wrong? But they wanted to give me a party. That was their impulse."

Certainly, Mack and the boys are romanticised and overly admired by the narrator and main character, Doc, compared to the harsh glare of reality. But there is an element of truth to all that the narrator & Doc [that is, Steinbeck] is saying. From being alienated to the madness of a regular back-stabbing life, the bums of Cannery Row and the acclimated-homeless people of Sacramento enjoy a certain availability to wisdom and openness and genuineness that is -- damn it -- admirable.

Bee Story Looks at Situation of Bannon Street Irregulars and Other Homeless Encampments

	A picture from the Bee story showing the Bannon Street encampment in late November.

First, it was the L.A. Times, and now the Sacramento Bee that has done an important story on its area homeless people.

The Bee story, "Sacramento seeks solutions for its wandering army of homeless," focuses on the Bannon Street Irregulars and an encampment over a mile to the east, called The Wasteland. It tells the tale of the pointlessness of the police rousting homeless people from campsites they've built in no-man's land. Where can the homeless go!?

The story also cites a lawsuit that is being pursued by several prominent Sac'to homeless-aid organizations to protect homeless folks' constitutional rights. The lawsuit seeks compensation for confiscation of homeless people's property and that some solution be found for the encampment-rousting run-around. The suit offers ideas and, generally, asks that the city and county to stop criminalizing homelessness.

The story could have been a tad more sympathetic to the trap homeless people find themselves in, but, generally, the story is a great, good thing, informing Sacramento citizens of the homeless encampment situation in the city.

Guidance for the Freshly Homeless

Joel John Roberts of L.A. Homeless Blog brings to our attention an article in today’s L.A. Times, “A guide for the newly poor,” of help to the tens of thousands who are finding themselves rookies to homelessness, out on the streets in the Los Angeles area.

Ideas in the Times guide can be helpful to anyone freshly down-and-out in any metropolitan area, though most of the linked resources are only helpful to Angelinos. But resources that are similar are available here in metropolitan Sacramento, and I would suppose, in other sprawling areas in this country. But you’ll have to find them on your own. Hopeful, my locality's Bee will put together a guide for the benefit of our homeless-to-be citizens.

The shock aspect of suddenly being out on the street is alluded to rather well. As is the idea of “entering a world of delays and bureaucracy.” But it will be good for the many, many anxious people out there to be aware that there are services that can help them – though the glut of people that will be crowding the streets and crowding the system is sure to foster anguish and depression for both newbie homeless and those of us who have been out here a while and now will have to contend with and compete with a growing hoard.

UPDATE: This says something about the times we're living in, I think. On the day the L.A. Times published its guide, the Tribune Company that owns the Times, the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Cubs baseball team, and a lot else, including ten smaller newspapers and 23 TV stations, filed for bankruptcy. Here's yesterday's New York Times story about it, "Tribune Company Seeks Bankruptcy Protection." It all has to make you think, wistfully, that the guide story was published in part as an aid for the newspaper's employees [whose jobs may be in jeopardy] and former employees [who took a buyout, recently]. At the Tribune website they posted this notice: “All ongoing severance payments, deferred compensation and other payments to former employees have been discontinued and will be the subject of later proceedings before the court.”

The Bannon Street Irregulars

The red-roof building to the left of the red star is the admin area of the mission. The large gray-roofed building just below [to the south] is the chapel, dining hall, dorm room and several small offices. Most of the Bannon Street Irregulars sleep in front of the gray-roofed building along both sides of the road with a few in sleeping bags on the sidewalk directly in front of the admin building.

A very curious thing about the Sacramento Union Gospel Mission — like nothing I've ever seen anywhere — is just outside mission property, out on the street.

On the sidewalk, against the black wrought-iron gate and fence and on the dirt on the other side of the two-lane street, are where the Bannon Street Irregulars* sleep and rest and eat. And on the pavement itself is where they frolic, mostly at night. It's very dangerous for the Irregulars because the road is narrow and there's a sharp curve right where they congregate. Sometimes cars pass through the area at high speeds.

In the spring and summer, during my first months of homelessness, the Irregulars had bedding and their few belongings on the street in spots they maintained. The Irregulars, a constantly shifting, changing group of perhaps fifty street people look out for one another, for the most part, but there are also very frequent fights that break out. Some fights end with a fire engine and ambulance showing up on the street and then, maybe, a police car with an arrest occurring. Too, there are other passionate discussions that occur on the street that may end quietly or escalate into something more troublesome.

The great majority of the street people are men between the ages of 20 and 55. Between four and eight, at any given time, are women. A few of the people will have dogs; there are typically three or four dogs on leashes around, most of which are gentle pitbulls. The street person who is recognized as the leader is an older black man named Champ. He often nobly intervenes when passions are raw, but other times stays out of things.

Though dirt poor in accumulated assets, most of the Bannon Street Irregulars do get checks and have expenses. At the beginning of every month, or shortly thereafter, the Irregulars get their "happy checks." The sources of the checks can be SSI or SSDI or veterans benefits, or, sometimes, small short-term general-assistance payments from the welfare office. Also, many find what work they can to earn some money.

By sleeping on the street and getting food from various sources, the Irregulars are able to use large portions of what money they receive for fun or to numb their suffering on substances they are fond of or addicted to. Alcohol, weed, crack, crystal meth, speed or a wide variety of other substances are targets of addiction, in addition to tobacco which is commonly used in the form of roll-your-owns, known as rollies.

Early in a month the Irregulars get their checks. At that time, the availability of beds in the guest shelter in the mission free up such that we regular mission sleep guests have no trouble securing a bed. Usually before mid-month, after the Irregulars have spent their money, largely on short stays in motel rooms and on their substances of choice, beds become competitive again and some men who want one will have to stay out.

Russell Yeargun of Radiant Life distributing food to the Bannon Street Irregulars. The story of how God changed Russell's life can be read at the Radiant Life webspace. [Permission to use photo granted by Russell Yeargun.]

While the Bannon Street Irregulars can and do get food from the mission [dinner at 8:30 every evening and lunch on Sundays are offered, following a sermon] or lunch, available seven days a week at Loaves & Fishes, which is just a mile away, they have other handy free sources of grub, too. Many are likely to be getting food stamps. Several groups, including Food Not Bombs with their hot tofu-and-vegetable plates, distribute food once a week in Chavez Park, downtown about two miles from the mission. Also, many groups and individuals, acting on their own, come to where the Irregulars are to feed them. Radiant Life and Abundant Life are two church groups that bring food on a set schedule. Bikers for Christ come with food, with their appearance being preceded by the roar of their choppers. Individual Samaritans come with sandwiches, pastries or soup they've prepared. Two young men irregularly appear distributing dozens of McDonald's burgers they bought nearby. Another food option: Pastor Dick Hedger of Downtown Baptist Church, who gives a sermon at the mission the first Thursday of each month, offers tickets for free McDonald’s meal deals to homeless people who attend his church’s Sunday or Wednesday services. Truly, like any metropolis, there are opportunities out there for the homeless of our extended city to stay fed. But it is especially important that the Irregulars, who may be apt to neglect their needs, be aided with diligence efforts that they be well. While there are many organizations involved in giving food to homeless Sacramentans, only Loaves & Fishes with their daily lunches [giving meals to 600 to 800 folks] feeds more than 125 people at a time in a metropolis where there are, perhaps, 2800 homeless.

In late summer, the population of the Irregulars began to increase and their presence on the street became more pronounced. A man with several ramshackle vehicles made from steel fencing, grocery carts and bicycle tires established a spot for himself. People began putting chairs on the street near the sidewalk. A hibachi got used regularly. Down the road, several vehicles were parked where homeless people slept. A large old trailer without a license tag became a few people’s makeshift home for a few weeks.

In May the city had reached an agreement with Greyhound to move their terminal from downtown to an area near the mission. Word later was that the new depot would be built beginning in mid-September. This was clearly the spur that got the police to make a play to move the Irregulars away from the area they occupied.

At night the police would arrive and roust out the street denizens. When this first happened, many Irregulars relocated at a spot near the American River. But others returned quickly to the Bannon St. locale. Soon, the Irregulars learned that there was no penalty for near-immediately returning after being banished.

After many rounds of roust-and-return, the economy began its tailspin and that put the skids to both the Greyhound move and the police effort to displace the Irregulars.

As fall arrived and the trees took on all their earthy colors, the nights got a bit wet and cold. Sometimes very cold. Tents began to spring up like wild mushrooms on the across-the-road-from-the-mission side in the Bannon Street Irregulars community. There were several big tents that were erected which could hold four beings. And there were small ones, too, that could keep a loner dry. Down the street, near where North B Street rounded a curve and had a name-change to Bannon, a tent village emerged on a piece of property no bigger than a quarter acre. The people there cooked chicken on an open fire and hung their clothes to dry on the wire fence.

Because of the bitter turn of the economy, the county of Sacramento delayed the opening of the so-called Winter Shelter [aka, Overflow] from Nov. 1 to Nov. 24. Overflow has a good reputation in the homeless community because of its beds on bunks [instead of bunk pads], tasty meals, lenient rules and TV room. Overflow adds 154 beds [104 for men; 50 for women] to the shelter opportunities we Sac’to homeless have in the cold months. The official close date is March 9, three weeks before its usual close. Hopefully, the weather will be friendly then. [Update: I am told by Barry Wisdom of VOA, in an email received on Dec 8, that, per Angelo Gama, there is a possiblity that the close date might be extended. Let us hope that it can be, especially if the weather in March is bad.]

In synch with the opening of Overflow, the Irregulars got notice from the police of their eviction from the street. As it happened, this time the police action was mostly successful. Today [Dec 3], only a few stragglers continue to sleep in front of the mission. And down the street, in the tent village, the population seems slightly reduced.

In the mission shelter, for the past three days, there have been about ten empty bunk beds out of the sixty available. And the number attending services and sitting for the evening meal have been greatly reduced. For the moment, things are rather good. The weather is chilly, but dry. Life goes on.


* I call them this, a play on the Baker Street Irregulars of several Sherlock Holmes stories. The Bannon street people are "irregular" in that they intermittently eat at and the men get beds at the mission.

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

In this post I am recommending a movie about homelessness to y'all. The movie I am recommending is NOT the movie that is titled the same as this post. That movie, made in 2000, which starred George Clooney, is a fine film, too, but the movie I am interested in having y'all see is the film that first came up with the title "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" -- as a part of the hijinks in Preston Sturges's 1941 romp Sullivan's Travels.

Why am I recommending this film to you? Because it is great and because of a post over at Rev. Danny Fisher's blog called "I'm Late to Blog Action Day." In his post, the reverend tells us he is late to acknowledge Blog Action Day, which was on October 15 and had as this year's issue of the year: Poverty. In his post, Danny links to 88 things you can do about poverty right now. The list is good and mostly about homelessness, but I am particularly taken by the second item on the list of things, which is this: Be homeless for a day/night - which blogger Lex offered as an idea over in her blog Ester of Elgin.

Also, a week ago, in an email to James of The Buddhist Blog [qv.] I had written, "... James, you should seek out the nearest men's homeless shelter where you live, dress down a bit, and stay there for a night. As I think of it, asking my homeful Buddhist readers to experience a wee bit of homelessness is something I must post about." THIS HERE is that promised post. [Hi, James. I hope you're reading this.]

Here, the Amazon.com "essential video" review of Sullivan's Travels:

Writer-director Preston Sturges's third feature, 1941's Sullivan's Travels, remains the antic auteur's most ambitious screen effort. Having added the producer's stripe to his duties, Sturges combines breezy romantic comedy, arch Hollywood satire, and social essay into a single, screwball story line.

The titular pilgrim is John L. Sullivan (Joel McCrea), an Ivy League grad who's enjoyed a meteoric rise as the director behind escapist movies like Ants in Your Pants of 1938, but is now determined to raise his sights toward more exalted, serious-minded cinematic art. His proposed breakthrough, portentously titled O Brother, Where Art Thou?, elicits a studio response closer to "Oh, brother," given the director's utter lack of first-hand experience on the wrong side of the tracks.

Instead of capitulating, Sullivan sets off disguised as a tramp, ready to meet life's crueler lessons face-to-face--albeit followed at a discreet distance by a motor home filled with studio handlers and reporters. His ludicrous odyssey may give the boy director no real insight, but it gives Sturges the chance to inject some reliably fine gags and a romantic subplot featuring the luminous Veronica Lake. It's at this juncture that Sturges the writer's darker objective throws a jolting shift in tone. Suffice it to say that just when a comic, upbeat denouement seems imminent, Sullivan travels instead from the sunlit California of the comedy's early reels toward a darker, relentlessly downbeat world influenced more by the social realism of the movies the hero desperately wants to make. By the final reel, Sturges has flirted with real tragedy, turning his conclusion into a meditation on his own seemingly carefree, dizzily comic art. --Sam Sutherland

Thus, as you see, Sullivan goes off to experience homelessness for a spell. I recommend that readers of this blog who have never been homeless do the same: Stay in a shelter for a couple days; eat at a place that serves free food to the poor; try to see what Buddha and Jesus experienced. Gain a touristic acquaintance of homelessness which is far better than no direct acquaintance.

As the movie shows, being homeless on a lark is NOT THE SAME as actually, really being subjected to the deprivations of homelessness and the wonders, splendors and cruelties in that world -- but it is a start toward learning a little bit about life "on the other side of things."

And of course a comedy movie, or even a serious documentary, won't prepare you for what it's like to be homeless. What is particularly nice about Sullivan's Travels is that "jolting shift in tone" that aids in revealing the "darker, relentless downbeat world" where one is shy of hope in a time-devouring place that is always uncomfortable. Being there is a jolt, but we owe it to humanity to be tasared by that reality that so very many proximate to us experience continually.

Update: Sullivan's Travels is New York Times writer A. O. Scott's Critics' Pick for October 20. Click here to view the three-minute viddy review.