Criminology class speech

here it is.
I have a horrible stomach flu right now, i would like nothing better then to crawl into bed and not see anyone. Instead ill be delivering this speech.
woo-hoo

Let me just start off by saying thanks for the opportunity to be here and speak to you all tonight, When I was first invited to come and speak here, I wasn’t sure how I was going to convey my experiences to you, My thoughts soon shifted to, this is an excellent forum for me to share the realities that are all to often overlooked in todays society, The dark truth that you wont see gracing the cover of our papers or magazines. I hope that you can learn a little bit about what it’s like to be living on your own survival instincts.
Tonight I would like to dispel a few myths and help you realize how hard it is to be able to gain any sort of stability when you find yourself in this situation.

Living on the streets is living in the public eye. 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You are living under a microscope. You are regarded as a cancer most places you go. You won’t find yourself getting friendly smiles, handshakes or going to social functions like most. You do however spend the majority of your time doing something illegal, I’m sure that the first things that come to mind when I mention illegal are drugs, violence or some sort of crime. But the fact of the matter is, that most of these things aren’t what a person would consider illegal, but what I personally consider an infringement on basic human rights. Weather it be sleeping in a park, because you don’t have shelter or sparing change, squeeging, looking for cans in a dumpster all of these things are illegal offences,
The mere task of survival has become illegal for some. Like in the city of Victoria you are not allowed to have your backpack on the ground I know when I was on the street anything and everything that I held sacred resides in your pack. Pictures, clothes, a camp stove, whatever it may be. The police will take all of these things from you and not release your property until you pay a $75 fine. I know when I was on the street, $75 was sometimes a weeks worth of work.

If you really think about it, whom is this by-law geared towards? Definitely not your working class citizen, they aren’t going to take someone’s brief case, if they were to rest it on the ground. If it is your ‘home’ then that’s where the by-law comes into effect. These types of laws are geared directly to the homeless and marginalized populations.
Victoria is not the only city that takes on these ‘initiatives’.
With Vancouver passing the new ‘Safe Streets’ act it begs the question, whom are you keeping safe?

I remember on one occasion when a large group of us were sleeping in the back alley in the staff parking area of a restaurant, with the owner’s permission. About 5 police cruisers pulled up, we were told to freeze, which wasn’t hard seeing as how we were all asleep anyway, while they pointed their tazers at us. We were then told not to make any sudden movements, they stood us up searched us and told us that even with the owners permission that if they found us here again we would be arrested and charged. This was a very safe spot for us all to sleep in a group, but after that night we were forced to disband and sleep either by ourselves or in couples which can be a lot more dangerous then sleeping with a large group of people that are willing to protect you, should the occasion arise. Who were these police protecting? The

In Toronto, my husband was well known to police, he was addicted to crack and to support his addiction he could be found squeeging for up to 15 hours a day. He had countless run-ins with the police, their ‘patience’ with him grew short and one night had hit a boiling point. At around 1230 am 2 bike patrol officers saw him squeeging at the intersections of Spidina and Front St. When the police tried to apprehend him in a very violent manner he tried to run away. The officers chased him up to the Spidina Bridge and proceeded to throw him over the edge. He plummeted 4 ½ stories onto gravel shattering both of his ankles, he got up and tried to run but fell over on his broken feet. Fearing for his life, he realized he couldn’t run he tried to crawl away. There was a near by ramp to get down the bottom of the bridge, the police went back to their bikes and rode down the ramp and picked him up as he tried to crawl away. The police did call an ambulance which was on the scene shortly after. He received only 10 hours of medical attention, long enough to get a dose of morphine and then he was sent off to court. The police then tried to say that my husband ‘beat them up’ and they had no choice but to throw him over the bridge. The judge then stated that there was no way that he beat anybody up, that the cops had intentionally thrown him over. He was then released from the court with the wheel chair from the hospital. The cops had stolen what little money he had; he was left in a wheelchair with 2 lottery tickets worth $15. Sounds like something from a movie now doesn’t it? Well, it’s no movie. My husband still walks with a limp and his heels are up where his ankles are. He never did receive any more medical treatment for fear of implicating the police and the retaliation that could come soon after.

Stories of police brutality are not uncommon; in fact most of the people I know have had unnecessary violent run-ins with police. I’ve been apprehended and beaten myself. Friends of mine have been picked up and dropped off in Stanley Park to wake up in the morning with their eyes swollen shut, not remembering what happened.

While being homeless you can lose all control over your life. Even resource’s such as drop in centers, shelters and other such services are supposed to be safe places, which, a lot of the time are more dangerous then sticking to yourself. While accessing these services you can find yourself exposed to drug dealers, women get exposed to the sex trade, you can be exposed to different ways to do crime for profit, the list goes on and on. This kind of poverty leaves you feeling helpless, and you can end up doing things that you wouldn’t normally do, you become a victim of circumstance; another statistic. People deal with things in different ways; some become addicted to drugs because it creates an escape from a harsh reality. Others use drugs like meth and crack because it causes you to stay awake, and some people would rather wait until it’s light to sleep instead of sleeping at night when it is much more dangerous. You can find yourself in a life of crime to support you or your drug habit, which will wind you up in jail. The cycle seems to be never ending.
People always used to say to me ‘why don’t you get a job?’ they would say this in passing and almost always continue walking without even waiting for an answer. Now lets look at the process of getting a job. You pass out, email and fax resumes. What kind of information is on a resume? Well first lets start with the letterhead, which contains your name, address, and phone number. You can most certainly put your name, but you don’t have an either an address or a phone number. How will perspective employers contact you? Well they cant. Lets think about the rest of the resume, which contains your experience, if you have been in and out of jail, or you have an addiction to something, what are you supposed to put into this category? Most of the people I know living on the street don’t have high school educations and have little or no experience in the workforce.

So lets say, somehow you land yourself a job interview. What are you wearing? Where are you showering? Where is your alarm clock to wake up in the morning? The barriers to gainful employment for a homeless person seem to go on and on. People don’t think of these things before they spit out callous remarks. They think the homeless are lazy and unintelligent. This really couldn’t be further from the truth; if the homeless were lazy they could quite possibly die. Every moment while on the street is a struggle, you have to always be looking for something whether it is a place to sleep or thinking about how you are going to get a meal. Think about always being on your guard, never having any privacy and never knowing when someone may come and steal all your belongings while you sleep. Wondering about the weather and if you are going to get hypothermia because of a rain or snowstorm.

I was reading once about a study conducted by Bruce Alexander, a psychologist who recently retired after thirty-five years at Simon Fraser University. Alexander believes that drug addiction isn’t so much about addiction as it is the environment surrounding someone. There’s no drug policy that will have much effect on addiction,” he says from his home in Vancouver. “I think that’s one of our diversions: ‘If we could just get the drug policy right, we’d solve our addiction problem.’ I don’t think that would touch it. The only way we’ll ever touch the problem of addiction is by developing and fostering viable culture.” He decided to start a study entitled Rat Park. Which was sort of a spin off of a ‘skinner box experiment’ A Skinner box is a cage equipped to condition an animal’s behavior through reward or punishment. In a typical drug test, a surgically implanted catheter is hooked up to a drug supply that the animal self-administers by pressing a lever. Hundreds of trials showed that lab animals readily became slaves to such drugs as heroin, cocaine, and amphetamines. “They were said to prove that these kinds of dope are irresistible, and that’s it, that’s the end of the addiction story right there,” Alexander says. After one particularly fruitless seminar in 1976, he decided to run his own tests. The problem with the Skinner box experiments, Alexander and his co-researchers suspected, was the box itself. To test that hypothesis, Alexander built an Eden for rats. Rat Park was a plywood enclosure the size of 200 standard cages. There were cedar shavings, boxes, tin cans for hiding and nesting, poles for climbing, and plenty of food. Most important, because rats live in colonies, Rat Park housed sixteen to twenty animals of both sexes. Rats in Rat Park and control animals in standard laboratory cages had access to two water bottles, one filled with plain water and the other with morphine-laced water. The denizens of Rat Park overwhelmingly preferred plain water to morphine (the test produced statistical confidence levels of over 99.9 percent). Even when Alexander tried to seduce his rats by sweetening the morphine, the ones in Rat Park drank far less than the ones in cages. Only when he added naloxone, which eliminates morphine’s narcotic effects, did the rats in Rat Park start drinking from the water-sugar-morphine bottle. They wanted the sweet water, but not if it made them high.
Rat Park showed that a rat’s environment, not the availability of drugs, leads to dependence. In a normal setting, a narcotic is an impediment to what rats typically do: fight, play, forage, and mate. But a caged rat can’t do those things. It’s no surprise that a distressed animal with access to narcotics would use them to seek relief.

So what do we learn from rat park? If horrible conditions did not exist I don’t think we would see as many addiction problems, homelessness or nearly as many exploited people.

It seems that all the solutions the government comes up with are those of the band-aid variety. They offer little to no actual support to stay stable. Thinking that handing over a menial amount of money to a homeless person will shut them up until right around the same time next month, when their next cheque is issued.

I consider myself one of the lucky people, which made a transition from street life to a life of stability. I became pregnant and made the decision to turn it all around. Finding a place was not easy. The housing crisis makes it hard for anyone with a low income to find safe housing. It took a lot of diligence, but we made it. I spent the first 3 months of my pregnancy in a hostel with my husband paying $40 a night to stay somewhere safe. He worked day labor while I would spend the day panhandling for food money, after we paid the nightly fee there was next to nothing left over and on the weekends we didn’t have the day labor to rely on, seeing as how they were closed on the weekends. I was lucky because I didn’t have an addiction to support, I was lucky because I was resourceful and found the right people to help us get on our feet. I’m lucky because now I have the most beautiful baby girl in the whole world. Looking back on things it was quite a journey to get where I am now, but I wouldn’t change it for the world.

So now I guess I would like to open it up for some questions, if you have anything to ask, please do….