Welcome to a citations needed news brief. I am Nemes Shirazzi.

I'm Adam Johnson. You can follow citations needed on Twitter at Citations

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episodes of citations needed. Thank you for joining us today today.

Adam we are going to be talking about a really critical Supreme Court case that is coming up in April that may very well redefine how homelessness and poverty is

understood and criminalized in this country.

So the court case is called City of Grants Pass, Oregon, the Gloria Johnson.

It's the Grants Pass, the Johnson case.

That effectively is to determine whether,

constitutionally, a local government city and municipality state can make it a crime

to involuntarily be homeless to not have a home to live outside and un sheltered when there is no

available shelter. So that's the kind of basic construct of the case and in grants pass it really had to do with the specific charge of camping

This idea of a kind of broad definition of what camping is to therefore criminalize certain aspects of when people are

deemed to be quote unquote camping which effectively is going to outlaw being without a home and therefore further criminalize by law being poor.

Yeah, it makes the use of blankets, pillows, cardboard boxes to protect yourself from the elements

illegal.

They've expanded the definition of camping that basically means anything protecting you from the elements

is camping and therefore illegal.

So you have to basically freeze to death outside or leave the city

because there's not sufficient housing and shelters. And so our guest, Jesse Rabinowitz, is working

...