'Swept off the streets': the substantive criminalisation of homelessness in Melbourne

© 2017 Dr. James William McRae PettyPoverty, nomadism and itinerancy have always posed problems for settled societies, problems that only intensified with the upheavals to social organisation wrought by global industrialisation. The modern manifestation of these qualities is homelessness. Strategies for the successful minimisation of rates of homelessness and mitigation of the harms (both individual and social) that arise from it are well established, yet these remain politically untenable in capitalist (and increasingly neoliberal) societies, and so their effectiveness is limited. However, state abandonment of the homeless is similarly untenable, and this results in strategies of governance that are limited in their capacity to address the challenges that it poses. This longstanding political impasse gives rise to the prevalent social belief that systemic homelessness is inevitable and those who experience it are at best feckless and idle, and at worst criminally deviant. This thesis maps out various facets of the socio-legal regulation of homelessness and the people who experience it. In short, it identifies the associative bonds that link homelessness to criminality. To achieve this, the thesis examines four key facets of the production of the homeless subject as ‘criminal’ and the regulatory responses that flow from this. First, the discursive production of homelessness as an individualised phenomenon determined by internal moral forces is addressed. The carceral and exclusionary histories of the regulation of poverty (namely, the legacy of Britain’s Poor Laws) are established before considering contemporary manifestations of the excluded homeless subject. Second, the issue of representation is addressed. I demonstrate that homelessness suffers from both over- and under-representation as a small yet highly visible minority (the ‘visibly homeless’) determine social attitudes, prevalent stereotypes and thus the shape and tenor of regulatory regimes. Obscured by the spectacle of the rough-sleeper is the large, shifting and inchoate population of the invisibly homeless and precariously housed. The visibility of the condition of the larger population is, I argue, managed (at least partly) to maintain the conspicuousness of more visible manifestations and thus the hegemony of the stereotypes that attend them. Third, the spatial dynamics of homelessness are examined. How urban spaces are constructed for the benefit of the domiciled consumer-citizen and, more controversially, to the detriment of those without stable housing are revealed. The emplacement of social borders concerned with the propriety of certain types of mobility is analysed as is the policing of these borders. Lastly, the political isolation of the homeless subject is revealed through an analysis of various policies and political structures that, directly and indirectly, isolate, marginalise and penalise the homeless subject. This occurs through various methods such as laws criminalising begging, as well as through the legal sanctioning of certain lived modalities and ways of being and the corollary stigmatisation and regulation of others outside of this constructed hierarchy of value. This thesis thus identifies the hidden and dispersed means through which homeless people are subjected to coercive regulatory regimes. The severe alterity of the ‘homeless Other’ is not easily captured in a singular site of penality like laws banning begging. Instead, a more comprehensive account of the treatment of homelessness as a crimino-legal subject is required to explain the severe marginalisation, disenfranchisement and exclusion experienced by this diverse population