The Alabama legislature is expected to take up new legislation at preventing people from loitering on public highways, which could be a new avenue to target panhandlers. The bill by Republican House member Reed Ingram of Pike Road would increase the penalties for loitering on the side of state highways. “This bill is a public safety bill. We’re going after making the roads safer,” Ingram said.
A federal judge last month struck down earlier Alabama laws against panhandling as unconstitutional, statutes that opponents said criminalized poverty. U.S. District Judge W. Keith Watkins issued the order March 10 permanently enjoining the state from enforcing the laws against begging and pedestrian solicitation. The decision ended litigation filed in 2020 challenging the laws on behalf of people who had been ticketed or jailed for panhandling in Montgomery.
Micah West is a senior staff attorney at the Southern Poverty Law Center. He explains the issue. “Homelessness is a social crisis that can’t be resolved through a criminal justice approach,” he said. “Instead, what we should be doing is very simple. We need to be investing in affordable housing.”
West says that the primary driver of homelessness is the gap between the cost of housing and people’s income. “Our state needs to turn from criminalizing people who are unhoused to focusing on our housing affordability and really see ourselves in our neighbors who are unhoused, right? People who are unhoused are our friends and our family who have fallen on hard times.”
