On Governing Magazine’s website, Thea Sebastian, Hanna Love and Tahir Duckett wrote:
Criminalizing homelessness is bad financially and bad for public safety. Homelessness and incarceration have long been linked, as many people shuttle between jails, prisons, emergency rooms and the streets. This cycle occurs at the front end and the back end. Homeless individuals are more likely to contact the criminal/legal system — especially as police enforce low-level “survival” crimes such as trespassing, sleeping in public or loitering — and formerly incarcerated people are nearly 10 times more likely to experience homelessness.
This cycle undercuts safety in multiple ways. The collateral consequences of even short-term jailing — such as loss of employment, separation from families, and fines and fees — increase the likelihood of future arrest while exposing arrested individuals to health risks and unsanitary conditions associated with jails.
I read that and knew I wanted to do a cartoon about how making sleeping in public a criminal act just adds to the cycle of homelessness.
As I was drawing this cartoon, I decided to finish this cartoon in black and white, and really dive into the cross-hatching as well as I could.
I love cross-hatched illustrations. I very distinctly remember the first time i saw the book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I flipped through it, and the pen and ink illustrations by Joseph Schindelman – which were almost entirely made of crosshatched shading, with very few contour lines – just blew me away. I had no idea anyone could draw like that!
I had such a blast drawing this! You’d think that cross hatching like this would be boring to make, but I actually enjoy it, living for a short while in a simple word of parallel lines and forms. I’d love to illustrate a book in this style someday.
My first draft script called for the bottom panel to have a landlord and an employer, each saying a line. Which, let’s face it, made a little more sense than combining them into one person.
The problem was, the direction the reader’s eye is moving in at the bottom, in a circular strip like this, is from right to left and a little bit from bottom to top – the complete opposite of the left-to-right, top-to-bottom way we read word balloons (in this country).
I just couldn’t find a way to arrange two word balloons so I’d be confident that readers would read them in the intended order. So I decided to combine the two mean capitalist characters into a single character, so they could say their bit in a single word balloon.
(As I’m typing this, another solution just occurred to me – I could have written the two word balloons so it didn’t matter what order they were read in. I hope I remember that the next time this problem comes up).
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has four panels, arranged so that they can be read in a clockwise circle. Each panel shows the same character – a homeless man wearing jeans, a hoodie, and a knit cap. I’ll call him “Knit.”
TOP PANEL
Knit is lying on a park bench, looking like he just woke up, and with a confused expression on his face. A cop holding a billy club stands over him.
COP: Get up! Public sleeping is now a crime. You’re going to jail.
An arrow leads from that panel to:
RIGHT HAND PANEL
Knit, looking confused and unhappy, is being kicked out of a building that has a sign over the door: “JAIL.” Knit looks confused and unhappy. We don’t see anything of the person kicking Knit out except for the shoe and leg that are doing the kicking.
KICKING GUY: You’ve served your time. Get out!
An arrow leads from that panel to:
BOTTOM PANEL
Knit, with a disappointed expression, is listening to a businessman-looking type wearing a necktie talk. The businessman has a stern expression.
BUSINESSMAN: You’ve been in jail! I’d never hire you, or rent to you.
An arrow leads from that panel to:
LEFT HAND PANEL
It’s dark out; the only light is coming from a door which has been open a crack. Knit stands in front of the door. A sign above the door says “SHELTER.” A woman inside is speaking to Knit through the crack.
WOMAN: Sorry, out of beds. Good luck.
An arrow leads from that panel back to the TOP PANEL.
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
“Chicken fat” is an obsolete cartoonists’ term for little details the cartoonist puts in which don’t matter at all, but they amused the cartoonist.
TOP PANEL: A newspaper lying on the ground, “Background Tribune,” says “IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU MAY HAVE WON A MILLION BUCKS!” Below that, in smaller print, it says “but probably not.”
And the bench has a little graffiti, a heart with “E + MC2” written inside it.
RIGHT HAND PANEL: Through the open door to the jail, we can see a poster on the wall, with a smiling cartoon bear wearing a guard’s cap and giving us a thumbs up. Above the bear, in large letters, it says “Protect Yourself From RSI.” In smaller letters below the bear, it says “always stretch before beating prisoners.”
One of the stones of the building’s wall is missing, and a man with a handlebar mustache is looking out nervously.
Another stone has a little barred window in it, and a mouse inside has its hands on the bars and looks out forlornly.
LEFT HAND PANEL: Woodstock from “Peanuts” is standing atop the building.
A major step towards solving this problem is the Housing First model (as opposed to Treatment First). A Review of the Evidence concluded:
I think it is important to the credibility of this source that Housing First is not presented as a panacea. The limitations of the approach are acknowledged.
Also, I think it is important for those of us on the left to acknowledge that laws that make it more difficult to evict people, although made with the best of intentions, do make it more difficult, or often impossible, for people with bad records to find housing.