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this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
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They post all their reasonings for every opinion on supremecourt.gov
In this case the tldr is the 8th amendment is concerned with the method or kind of punishment. And here it's a limited fine for 1st time offenders, a court order prohibiting camping in parks, then to a max of 30 days in jail for people who violate that order.
Here's the link to the full text: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-175_19m2.pdf
That sounds reasonable until you remember that debtors prison is back, most states make people pay for their incarceration, and semi regular arrests are going to make sure you can't keep a job to pay that "obligation".
This is a backdoor into giving more people to the prison industry.
They aren't trying to find what's reasonable, they're trying to find what the law says. There are a lot of stupid things that aren't unconstitutional, like the death penalty. The majority operates on a 'garbage in garbage out' basis. We got a garbage outcome because they have a garbage law, and we haven't gotten an amendment against it yet.
That said I wholly agree with the sentiment and message regarding the penal institutions we have. The attempts the find different ways to fund that correctional system are consistently producing negative outcomes. The state should bear it's full weight so that they have incentive to maintain a low prison pop.
SCOTUS has absolutely set realist standards in the past. For example, gun regulations that are de facto bans are treated as such and declared unconstitutional.
They absolutely do not have to sit back and consign homeless people to the prison debt system while bemoaning their inability to enforce the 8th amendment.
The issue is the 8A is understood to have refered to the punishments being cruel or unusual, per the Court, not the offense. The actual punishments here (fine, court order, or 30 days in jail) are fairly normal for laws, the only odd thing about the statute is what the "crime" is.
The court chose that narrow view. They chose to naively interpret the punishment as ending and not transitioning into new forms that can dog people the rest of their lives. It is not something they were required to do. As the dissent points out.