The criminalization pipeline: a cautionary tale

by Sarah A. Koski

For the last two years, I have written Eugene’s Homeless Heartbeat as a bit of a social experiment from very close to the ground. I have written about the people sleeping outside, those trying to help them, the systems that sometimes work and the ones that fail spectacularly.

I have never argued that homelessness should simply be tolerated, that addiction should be ignored, or that serious mental illness should be romanticized as personal freedom. Anyone who has spent enough time in this work truly, truly knows better.

But this may be my most heartfelt, urgent post of all. I am increasingly convinced that the most consequential homelessness work is no longer happening on the street.

It is happening several thousand feet above us.

A well-funded conservative policy network is developing a new philosophy of homelessness, translating that philosophy into model legislation, carrying those ideas into statehouses, and finding increasingly receptive partners in the federal government. What initially looked like scattered political frustration with homelessness is beginning to look much more coordinated.

And local communities need to understand what is being built before they inherit it.

Follow the architecture, not the rhetoric

The organization I believe deserves far more collective understanding is the Cicero Institute, founded by billionaire technology investor Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir.

Cicero describes itself as a nonpartisan public-policy organization, but its homelessness agenda represents a dramatic departure from the Housing First philosophy that has shaped federal homelessness policy for years. It advocates prohibitions on unauthorized street camping, greater use of sanctioned camping and transitional environments, changes to civil commitment laws, and redirecting homelessness funding away from permanent housing programs that do not require treatment or sobriety.

As politicos know, there is nothing inherently sinister about a think tank proposing legislation. Think tanks across the political spectrum have done that forever.

The Cicero Foundation and its policy institute is another story and what matters most is what happens next.

A January 2026 Truthout investigation describes Cicero Action, the organization’s advocacy arm, working with lawmakers around the country to advance legislation based upon these ideas. It documents a network seeking to move homelessness policy away from Housing First and toward enforcement, mandated treatment and institutional responses.

Mother Jones has separately examined Lonsdale, Cicero and the growing political influence of a group of wealthy technology figures who increasingly see government itself as something that can be redesigned through the same engineering mentality Silicon Valley applies to companies and software.

That is the part of this story that both fascinates and frightens me.

People experiencing homelessness are particularly vulnerable subjects for technocratic experimentation because they possess almost none of the organized political power normally required to resist it. They generally do not have lobbyists or make significant campaign contributions. With significant barriers to access, many don’t vote. Some cannot reliably appear at a legislative hearing at 8 a.m. on a Tuesday. Decisions about their lives can therefore be made in hearing rooms and policy shops they will never enter, by people they will never meet.

And increasingly, the proposed future follows a recognizable sequence: make sleeping in unauthorized public places illegal, expand the authority of government to compel treatment, replace some long-term permanent housing with temporary or congregate environments, tie public resources more closely to behavioral compliance, and use the criminal justice system as the mechanism that moves people from the street into those systems.

Then call it compassion.

Lousiana’s compliance to these new ‘rules’ should scare us all

If you want to understand why I am writing this now, look at Louisiana.

House Bill 211, which passed the Louisiana House 70-28, would make unauthorized public sleeping punishable by as much as six months in jail and a $500 fine. Subsequent offenses could bring one to two years imprisonment with hard labor and a $1,000 fine.

The proposal also creates a path in which defendants can enter mandatory rehabilitation for at least twelve months rather than incarceration. According to reporting on the bill, those unable to pay for treatment could be required to perform unpaid labor toward its cost.

I want Oregonians to sit with that for a moment without immediately retreating into partisan camps.

A person has nowhere private to sleep. Government criminalizes where they sleep, turning an unavoidable consequence of their homelessness into a criminal offense. That offense then gives the state greater authority over their body and their choices. They may face incarceration or mandatory rehabilitation, and under the Louisiana proposal, inability to pay for that rehabilitation could result in unpaid labor.

At what point in that progression are we allowed to ask what, exactly, we are constructing?

I use words like “indentured servitude” cautiously because history deserves precision. What Louisiana is proposing is not the historical legal institution of indenture. But when homelessness can produce a criminal offense, that offense can lead to compulsory rehabilitation, and poverty can leave someone performing unpaid labor toward the cost of that compulsory rehabilitation, Americans have every right to become profoundly uncomfortable.

We should be asking these questions before such a model becomes ordinary, not afterward.

This isn’t really about whether treatment is good

That is the rhetorical trap I hope Oregon avoids.

Of course treatment is good. I have watched addiction destroy people I care about, and I have watched severe mental illness leave human beings profoundly vulnerable. There are people living outside right now who need psychiatric intervention far beyond what an outreach worker, shelter or a housing voucher can provide. Pretending otherwise isn’t compassion.

But treatment is not the same thing as forced treatment, and forced treatment represents an enormous exercise of government power. Before we normalize it, we should have to answer some very onerous but very necessary questions.

Where are these treatment beds? Who operates them? Who sets the clinical standards? How long can someone be held? What due process rights do they retain? What happens when someone refuses medication? What happens when insurance stops paying, or when the person never had insurance to begin with? Who profits from the treatment facility? Who provides independent oversight? What constitutes successful rehabilitation?

And perhaps most importantly: Where does the person live when mandatory rehabilitation ends?

These questions gets lost in an infinite loop of treatment, discharge, homelessness, enforcement and treatment again. You can mandate sobriety. But when treatment ends, the housing crisis is still waiting outside the door.

The national machinery is already turning

This is why dismissing Cicero as merely another conservative think tank (and ignoring its national reach) misses the larger story entirely.

The federal government has explicitly moved toward a “Treatment First” philosophy. President Trump’s July 2025 executive order directed agencies, in certain grant programs, to prioritize jurisdictions that enforce prohibitions on urban camping and loitering, encouraged changes involving civil commitment, and criticized Housing First as an approach the administration argues fails to sufficiently address addiction and behavioral health.

In August 2026, HUD and the Office of National Drug Control Policy formally released a Treatment First Homelessness Toolkit, followed days later by HUD and HHS announcing a broader move away from Housing First and toward treatment, recovery and self-sufficiency.

Look at the progression: a think tank develops a philosophy; policy papers give it structure; model legislation carries it into statehouses; pieces begin appearing in state law and federal executive policy; federal funding gives those priorities leverage; and eventually local governments are left to implement them.

This is no longer an abstract national argument. It is moving closer to our own front door.

And eventually it will reach Eugene.

We do not have to imagine Eugene five years from now to understand what is coming. The machinery that could reshape homelessness policy here is already being assembled, and pieces of it are already arriving.

This is how a national ideology becomes local policy. It does not arrive in Eugene with the Cicero Institute’s name printed across the top of an ordinance. It arrives through federal grant requirements that determine which programs we can afford to operate. It arrives through model legislation repackaged for state lawmakers. It arrives through changes to civil-commitment standards, camping ordinances, treatment requirements and definitions buried deep inside administrative rules. It arrives one provision at a time, each presented as a reasonable response to a very real crisis.

And once that financial architecture changes, the philosophical architecture follows.

A community that once asked, “How do we get this person housed?” can slowly begin asking, “How do we get this person off the street?” Those questions sound remarkably similar. They are not.

One requires us to solve the extraordinarily difficult problems of housing affordability, psychiatric capacity, addiction treatment, poverty and long-term support. The other can be accomplished with an ordinance, a police officer, a court order and somewhere out of sight to send people.

That distinction may define the next era of homelessness policy in America.

We are approaching a moment when America may become so exhausted by the visibility of homelessness that we begin accepting the control of homeless people as evidence that we are ending homelessness.

This is a cautionary tale.

 Sarah Koski is the author of ‘Eugene’s Homeless Heartbeat: Stories of Resilience and Community.’ You can read more at SarahCascadia.Substack.com.