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Housing the homeless at Kolbe: can it work?

GeneralHousing the homeless at Kolbe: can it work?
Last week Belize City mayor Darrell Bradley, during the announcement of the Belize City Council’s “100-day plan”, discussed point 82 of the plan under “quality of life crimes”, which aims to “work with the Kolbe Foundation, [Department of] Human Services and the police to deal with vagrants.”
  
According to the Mayor, he has held initial discussions about the proposal with the chair of Kolbe, businessman John Woods, who presides over the management team of the Central Prison at Hattieville. Kolbe has managed the prison on behalf of the Government of Belize (according to Woods), which retains official control, since 2002.
  
It is an attempt to address the public health situation in Belize City, where scores of homeless people sleep on the streets and sidewalks in the downtown area and beg for a living from visitors to the thoroughfare.
 
While the Mayor was quick to assure that the intent was not simply to place them in jail, he did maintain that something has to be done: “…to me, the worst thing that we can do with the homeless is leave them in the condition they are in. And the reason is, people don’t even treat them like human beings; people walk on the street and walk past a homeless person on the floor, as if they are not even there; you don’t even value their humanity. If we can put in place a program by a person who is willing to work with us, and willing to accept some basic criteria in terms of humaneness… then that is something we will jump at….”
 
Mayor Bradley added that Woods’ proposed program would establish counseling services, cleaning up those on drugs or with mental problems, and reuniting them with lost families.
 
The other aspect of the program is how to reach the target population, and this is proving controversial. For the Mayor, it is as simple as this: “…loitering, vagrancy, these things are offences, they are crimes. Nobody doesn’t have a right to sleep in Battlefield Park…. I have heard of no other explanation, or no other way or no other solution to this issue and we have to be serious about it.”
 
The Mayor insisted that there would be greater consultation and “buy-in” on the proposal and called on interested persons to come up with something better if they disagree: “We have to have a plan. The plan cannot be that we do nothing, the plan cannot be that we leave them in Battlefield Park…as it stands currently, this (the proposal) is what we have.”
 
This past Saturday, in an exclusive interview with Amandala, Woods offered more details of how the proposal was made and the rationale behind it.
 
According to Woods, around the time Kolbe took over the management of the Hattieville Prison, “…there was a program going on: if they were vagrant and had no place to live, they were arrested and they were sent by the courts to prison for a two-month time. And I said [to Bradley], the amazing thing was, they would come in with a wild look on their faces, they would be half-naked, they would have sores on their bodies; and within two or three weeks they would be pretty well cleaned up…”
 
Woods assured us, and the Mayor, that Kolbe has the facilities and the human resources to reopen a vagrancy program. In addition to regular staff, he sees an opportunity for volunteer inmates, whom Woods pointed out are in some cases “good people who have been caught up,” to help in their own rehabilitation by contributing to the care of these persons. And not all potential vagrants would be treated as such – some would be transferred to the mental health facility and others to the drug rehabilitation program, but all would be given counseling and an opportunity to be restored to health and vitality.
 
(As an example of how this would work he pointed to former murder suspect Crispin Moreno, who was left paralyzed in a traffic accident on the Northern Highway last May and was nursed back to health by his fellow inmates; his charges were eventually dropped.)
 
While Kolbe does manage a prison and, theoretically, the vagrants would be criminals and prisoners (even subject to multiple re-sentencing as necessary), they would be treated with love and respect and as “human beings,” in a far better condition than where they are now, he stated. The program, if implemented, said Woods, would be subject to governmental rules and regulations and use government resources, as Kolbe itself is a non-profit organization and does not make any money from its management of the Hattieville prison. It does do fundraising and accept donations for the day-to-day administration of the facility.
 
Like Bradley, Woods maintains that he is willing to listen to other ideas, and insists that the present state of affairs is not an option, particularly with Belize City faced with a high, and steadily increasing, crime rate. In fact, several homeless persons in the last few years have been targeted and killed, most recently Clifford “Pecka” Stephens, Jr., 48, on December 25, 2011, and Evan Jones, 40, in February of this year.
 
A check of the Summary Jurisdiction (Offences) Act, Chapter 98 of the Laws of Belize, nets only a few vague references to “loitering,” “vagrancy” and “idle and disorderly” persons. Indeed, much of the language of the Act, written in the colonial era, is disparaging, referring to “incorrigible rogues,” “vagabonds,” and the like.

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