Editorial: Homeless plan doesn’t make sense

Friday, July 27, 2001 | 4:43 a.m.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman hasn't tried to hide his hostility for the homeless, but last week the mayor reached a new low. Goodman said he is asking the city's staff to explore the possibility of sending all the city's homeless to a prison in Jean that is no longer used by state government. Apparently Goodman's guiding philosophy on the homeless is "out of sight, out of mind," which is what he hopes he will get if the homeless are warehoused in the desert 25 miles from Las Vegas.

Goodman says that the homeless would have to live together at the prison, where he claims they would have access to medical care, food and shelter. And what if some of the homeless don't want to be housed in a prison? "I don't care if they don't want to move there or not, sometimes people don't have choices," Goodman told "News ONE," the television news show jointly broadcast by the Sun and KLAS-TV. Currently it is no crime to lose your job or be without shelter, but if Goodman's plan were implemented, the net effect would be to forcibly ship the homeless off to a prison -- without a trial. It's intriguing that Goodman, a former defense attorney who represented organized crime figures, would come up with such an idea.

The mayor's suggestion isn't practical, either, especially if the goal is to get the homeless back in the workforce. After all, it doesn't make much sense to send them to a remote place where they can't work during the day. It shouldn't be forgotten that many of the men and women who are homeless do have jobs in the city, it's just that they don't make enough money to afford an apartment. And busing homeless day-workers back and forth every day between Jean and Las Vegas is illogical since there are social services and shelters for the homeless already in place in the city.

It's easy to pick on the homeless -- they can be unkempt and their appearance sometimes frightens people. The homeless also don't generate much public sympathy -- unless it's Thanksgiving or Christmas. In addition, they don't constitute a coveted voting bloc and they don't donate huge sums of campaign contributions, making them of little value to some politicians. Despite efforts to make the homeless something less than human, these men, women and children should be afforded the dignity that they were born with. The mayor and the City Council should work on ways to help the homeless -- not warehouse them in a prison.