ASPHER Past President, Professor John Middleton recently presented evidence to the meeting of the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Mr Rajagopal, and the UN Special Rapporteur on poverty and human rights, Olivier De Schutter, on April 2nd, 2024. GNAPH is pleased to reproduce this statement here, with permission of the UN Rapporteurs’ Secretariat. Their full report is due to be published early in July 2024.
John is ASPHER’s nominated member of the Global Network for Academic Public Health (GNAPH), an association of schools of public health around the world. He is currently Vice President for GNAPH. He is also a Fellow of the Global Law Enforcement and Public Health Association (GLEPHA). GLEPHA is a body bringing together policing and public health professionals to improve public health and safety.
John has collaborated on issues of criminalising poverty with Rona Epstein, of the Crimetobepoor Research network. They have produced blog pieces for the United Kingdom Faculty of Public Health and the British Medical journal.
Professor Middleton’s intervention led to a further opinion piece in the British Medical Journal, with Professor Alex Bax, Chief Executive of the UK Pathway, the UK Healthcare for Homeless people charity:
Bax A, Middleton J. Homelessness is a health emergency: criminalising homeless people will only make it worse BMJ 2024;385:q1165. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.q1165
It is John Middleton's view that there is no evidence for criminalisation of social and societal problems. Collaborative interventions between health, policing, social welfare and housing authorities are needed to address problems of exclusion, vulnerability, homelessness, poverty, addictions, mental and physical disability; and there needs to be a fundamental overhaul for the unequal administration of justice between rich and poor.
We reproduce Professor Middleton’s evidence here.
Evidence for the UN Special Rapporteurs session on the Criminalisation of homelessness and poverty
Thank you for inviting me to attend the expert consultation meeting of the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Mr Rajagopal, and the UN Special Rapporteur on poverty and human rights, Olivier De Schutter, on April 2nd, 2024. I am writing to follow up my comments at the Special Rapporteurs’ session.
I joined your meeting on behalf of The Global Law Enforcement and Public Health Association (GLEPHA) of which I am a Fellow. I am also Vice President of the Global Network for Academic Public Health (GNAPH) and speak with 40 years of experience in public health services, academia, and action research. I am also connected with the Crime To Be Poor research group in the UK and will share some of their research with the Special Rapporteurs.
GLEPHA has members from all over the world and comprises leading edge policing, teaching and advocacy for policies which reduce crime and improve health for individuals and communities. Many of our most active contributors are in the US, Canada, Australasia, and South Africa.
GNAPH represents the Associations of Schools of Public Health in the six World Health Organization regions.
We are all concerned about policies which criminalise vulnerable people, women and children and people from minorities; we consider criminalisation to be a negative approach to addressing societal problems which are better met by understanding individual problems, providing preventive measures, and enabling supportive recovery and rehabilitation. Criminalising homelessness represents one of the most extreme examples of the victim blaming approach, and presents, the possibility to make worse the conditions which caused the problem in the first place; for example, by denying services and rights to people who were first homeless, and then giving them criminal convictions for this. Criminalisation and criminal justice interventions alone have never been effective in the control of drug related harms, (1,2) or addressing harms related to sex work. (3,4) An example of a recent Edmonton Police intervention with homeless people is a case study of what is possible when policing actions against homeless encampments, are driven by safety concerns, and delivered in partnership with health and social welfare services for homeless people. (5) (Appendix 1)
Most of my professional work has focussed on healthy public policies and on preventing problems arising in the first place. Many of the problems of homelessness arise through inequalities in income, access to education and unequal access to healthy environments. People with mental health problems, disabilities, and other vulnerabilities lack the means to cope, exposing them to poverty and homelessness, and criminal stigma. The problems faced by women, single parents, and people of different sexual orientation, need to be addressed with care and support, not with a criminal record and further societal exclusion. Adverse childhood experiences expose people to lifelong physical, mental and social harms and there is growing recognition of the need for trauma-informed approaches to policing, health and social care. (6,7)
The Special Rapporteurs clearly recognise the need for policies to prevent homelessness. The Finnish approach ‘Housing First’ is a model which should be encouraged globally. (8) The problem of the homeless, is being without a home. In addition to the overall housing first policy, there are now a wide range of self-build projects which address the need for a home and offer homeless people on the job training and skills in construction, helping both a housing and employment and economic need. And there is no reason why homeless people should not also benefit from high quality, innovative design and environmental standards in these schemes. Some examples of UK self-build and self -help housing schemes with homeless people are at appendix 2.
Crime to be Poor research, and express concerns that criminal justice services act unfairly and give worse outcomes in terms of punitive sentences to people who are homeless, poor, and vulnerable. The processing of these people is unequal from the start, with rights and opportunity for representation and appeal often denied. The treatment of women through criminal justice in the UK seems particularly harsh with many imprisoned who have not been represented in court. Why pregnant women are imprisoned at all should be a concern. Regarding drugs offences, the rich go to rehab, the poor go to jail. The stigmatisation of a criminal record only adds to the problem of being homeless in the first place, adding to numbers of homeless people and to their inability to help themselves back into regular society. Some key references from Crime to be Poor research are attached as appendix 3.
Thank you again for the opportunity to submit evidence.
Professor John Middleton
Global Law Enforcement and Public Health Fellow
Vice-President, Global Network for Academic Public Health
Past President, Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region, (ASPHER)