As you walk through the streets of San Diego, or any other American city, you will see the homeless. People living rough in the urban landscape. Each one is somebody’s brother, mother, son, cousin, or spouse. In addition, many of them had fought for our country.

Dylan Mann, a contributor to Voice of San Diego, says it well:

You see them in the medians at intersections and at the bottom of freeway off-ramps. Suntanned and weary in camouflage pants, they hold magic-markered signs announcing: ‘HOMELESS VET — ANYTHING HELPS — GOD BLESS.’ And you feel empathy for them, don’t you? No matter what you think of our nation’s military campaigns, it’s undeniable that here before you is a person that once served our country, but now he sleeps outside and isn’t sure when he’ll eat next.

Because of good weather and a high cost of living, San Diego has a lot of homeless people. There are 8,500 homeless people [PDF] in the county and 35 percent of them (3,000) are veterans. The relatively high proportion of veterans among San Diego’s homeless is probably due to our proximity to military bases.

Among the homeless nationwide, veterans comprise 20-25%. Now, it is no secret that the strain of combat can create a wide variety of mental ailments. From “shell shock,” to “battle fatigue,” to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — the name has changed repeatedly while the ailment itself has remained a constant backbeat to our international conflicts. Is this the prime cause behind the number of veterans on the streets? Maybe not. Mann continues:

But, according to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, only a third of homeless veterans were ever stationed in a combat zone. So, why are the other two-thirds on the streets? Unfortunately, nobody knows for sure.

While there may not be certainty about the cause, there are at least some possibilities:

The Rosenheck-Fontana study of Vietnam veterans shows various correlations, but its takeaways are not entirely clear. The study’s major finding was that if upon returning to civilian life, veterans had low levels of social support, non-PTSD psychological disorders, substance abuse, or were unmarried, they were significantly more likely than their peers to be homeless.

The factors should look familiar if you have been following our work. They are circumstances that crop up repeatedly in our examination of homelessness and other social justice issues. Likewise, Mann cites additional factors that are, again, familiar to us from our prior research:

Additionally, it identified several factors that predisposed soldiers to homelessness. If vets had been foster children or had significant childhood trauma (e.g. physical, sexual, etc.) before entering the military, they were more likely to be homeless, whether or not they saw combat while in the service. These results could suggest that strong emotional development in childhood is necessary for soldiers to reintegrate into civilian society. Alternatively, they might mean that troubled youth are more likely than their peers to join the military. But, in the end, we can’t definitively say why so many non-combat veterans end up being homeless. The more important question, of course, is ‘How do we get them off the streets and back to normal, productive lives?’

And that, indeed, is the crux of the matter — how to reintegrate these people into the everyday society they have left behind? Switching our emphasis from retribution to rehabilitation is one approach that seems to consistently yield greater and more lasting results when encountered in practice. Mann spends almost half of his column on examining the Veterans Village of San Diego (VVSD). It seems like a very interesting project, one of the few that works in conjunction with — rather than in opposition to — the Veterans Administration.  Just click the link under the Sources (below) to read more.

Source: “Why So Many Homeless Vets in San Diego?,” San Diego Voice, 08/25/10
Image by Ed Yourdon, used under its Creative Commons license.

“One size fits all” is not an adage that applies to social issues. It’s especially true in the case of education. Most of the issues we at HUMANE EXPOSURES cover in our books are affected by access to quality education. From the homeless issues presented in downTownUSA: A Personal Journey with the Homeless to the inside view of female imprisonment shared in Maggots in My Sweet Potatoes: Women Doing Time, we see education as a frequent backbeat to the overall story.

Thus it is with great interest that we follow news of innovation in the realm of education. Unfortunately, the news is not always good. Last Tuesday, the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced the most recent states to win the “Race to the Top” competition. While that would seem to be good news, there do seem to be a few troubling details. There is an odd geographic footprint to the awards distributed by this Obama Administration’s signature educational initiative.

You see, with the exception of Hawaii, all of the states that were awarded major grants under the program are east of the Mississippi, and the majority of them hug the eastern seaboard. Oddly enough, my home state of Louisiana, which was considered a shoe-in for funding, has received nothing under the program.

Some good arguments are made by these states that chose not to vie for the funds, as Sam Dillon reports for The New York Times:

Educators in many of the states that did not win, or did not even participate in the competition — which includes every state from Tennessee west to the Pacific — said they were hamstrung from the outset.

They said the competition’s rules tilted in favor of densely populated Eastern states, which tend to embrace more the ideas that Washington currently considers innovative, including increasing the number of charter schools and firing principals in chronically failing schools.

But those rules have seemed a poor fit for the nation’s rural communities and sparsely populated Western regions, experts said.

In small towns, for example, there is often just one school, so setting up a parallel charter school might not be feasible. It can also be hard to attract principals to such communities. And many of rural states do not have the resources or staff to write sophisticated grant applications.

While adding funding to our strained school system is something that is obviously needed, the needs and resources of the communities in question need to be evaluated before we declare that something is “the right choice,” for everyone. One size does not fit all.

Source: “Eastern States Dominate in Winning School Grants,” The New York Times, 08/24/10
Image by Nicholas T., used under its Creative Commons license.

Five years ago last Sunday, the city of New Orleans flooded when the levees failed in the wake of hurricane Katrina. The time following the flood was a complex and horrible stew of tragic tales and noble moments, many of which never made it into the mainstream media. Today, I would like to take a look at one especially disturbing set of stories: the plight of the imprisoned when the flood waters rolled in.

People have been thinking about this a bit more since the issue was addressed in an episode of HBO’s Treme. Last April, the critically acclaimed series presented a story all too familiar to people in the area, yet strangely glossed over by the national coverage. It was a subplot about a woman whose brother was incarcerated when the flooding occurred. All attempts to locate him had come to naught for months, until she finds picture of him amongst the prisoners from the Orleans Parish Prison (OPP), who were herded onto an I-10 overpass, where they have stayed without supplies or shade for days.

The Back of Town blog, which analyzes Treme from the perspective of those who were there, immediately provided a counterpoint, penned by Sam Jasper: “You had him all the time! – Toni Bernette HBO Treme. [Disclosure: I sometimes contribute to Back of Town. - Loki] In it, she recounts being told of the reality of the situation by one of the former prisoners:

Eventually he was one of those ferried to the overpass. No water, no food, no information at all. Only sun. He said he noticed his skin was in bad shape from having been in the water with god knows what else polluting it. Eventually he wound up at Hunt in San Gabriel. There 3000 OPP inmates were put in a maximum security prison (remember, many had not yet been charged or were in for minor misdemeanors) in a field. At this point there was no more sorting. No more protection from the violent offenders. Everyone was dumped in the field. There was a young man who’d never been in jail before near Ike. The kid was panicking and falling apart. Ike got hold of him and calmed him down, explaining that he didn’t want to draw attention to himself or he’d be in danger. The young man listened and glued himself to Ike, shaking the entire time. He was shaking not only from fear, fear of the other prisoners and the extremely hostile inmates of San Gabriel, but also from dehydration. He remembers it taking a long time before the prisoners got food or water.

As for the authorities, they had no idea who any of these guys were. No records had accompanied them, not only because of their evacuation but also because most had been destroyed in the basement of OPP. So the authorities now had 7000 people in their custody and no earthly clue who any of them were. Were they violent rapists or a guy who mouthed off to a cop on Frenchmen Street? No idea. Families had no way of finding these prisoners and the prisoners had no way of knowing what had happened to their own families, much less a way to contact them when communications were completely useless at that time. Lots of people just got lost. The public defenders were gone, many just quit, already overloaded with casework before the storm ever hit.

It is common knowledge that the American penal system is a shambles. Add the chaos of a natural disaster such as a California forest fire or a man-made one like the levee failure in New Orleans, and the breakdown is terrifyingly complete. The lessons of five years ago are vital for all of us, no matter where.

If you want a detailed view of exactly what happens when an already broken system is embedded in a situation of a complete societal breakdown, I advise the following BBC documentary, embedded here in full, Prisoners of Katrina:

In a time when earthquakes, forest fires, tornados and terrorist threats seem to crop up every season, it seems wise to examine these stories and work towards the prevention of more of them in the future. When Mother Nature calls, she calls collect, and you can’t refuse the charges.

Source: ““You had him all the time!” ~Toni Bernette, HBO Treme,” Back of Town, 04/22/10
Source: “Down by Law: Orleans Parish Prison before and after Katrina,”  Dollars and Sense, 03/06/06
Source: “ACLU Report Details Horrors Suffered by Orleans Parish Prisoners in Wake of Hurricane Katrina,”  ACLU, 08/10/06
Source: “Prisoners of Katrina,”  Google Videos, 08/06
Image by NASA Goddard Photo and Video, used under its Creative Commons license.

Interesting things are happening in the California penal system. Both sides of the aisle, left and right, have plans for a big change in the way the prison system works. Of course, much of this is being fueled by the massive deficit facing the state.

It seems that the shortage of cash on the part of the government has those in power trying to find ways to shift the prison population into less costly venues. Michael Gardener, a writer for the San Diego Union-Tribune, explores the details in his recent piece in Sign on San Diego:

The state’s plans to ship low-risk prisoners to local jails could cost counties revenue and are raising fears that inmates may be released early. Transferring non-sex offender prisoners to county jails are centerpieces of dueling plans put forward by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and state Senate Democrats as they scramble to close a $19 billion budget gap.

The foundation of both proposals is to save the state money by offering counties incentives — including cash and greater alternative sentencing authority — to accept more prisoners.

The initiatives are drawing resistance from San Diego County supervisors, statewide law enforcement groups and Republican lawmakers.

‘Counties are very concerned and very suspicious,’ said Greg Cox, a San Diego County supervisor.

A variety of arguments, pro and con, are being presented by both the media and the political class. Suppporters stress that, if implemented, plans like this would give the counties greater lattitude to explore alternative methods such as drug treatment, supervised probation, and others methods that are slowly gaining steam as our prisons fill past the bursting point with mostly non-violent offenders.

On the flip side, the counties are wary of state-proposed programs due to the fact that state payments have usually lagged well behind the costs burden that the programs represent. The cost trail will be important to examine, since it will be one of the major factors fueling this debate. Another one, and by far the most important from a human standpoint, is the offenders themselves. While the phrase “early release” ring warning bells for many in California, it is important to examine whether these people truly need to be incarcerated.

What are your thoughts? If you live in California, we would particularly like to hear your pros and cons on this subject.

Source: “State’s plans to send prisoners to county jails worry officials,” Sign On San Diego, 08/25/10
Image by Tim Pearce-Los Gatos, used under its Creative Commons license.

So many issues trace back to childhood. The opportunities, the lack thereof, early life traumas, and all the other factors that can impinge on early life, create the building blocks from which the adult is sculpted. Educational opportunities are particularly key, especially during the early years when the mind is so hungry for knowledge.

The Constitution of the State of California guarantees free education. In 1984, the state Supreme Court handed down a decision that refined the legal interpretation to include extracurricular activities offered by public schools. It is an interpretation that the ACLU claims many schools are ignoring.

Tanya Sierra, a staff writer for Sign On San Diego’s Watchdog blog, tells us more:

This month, the ACLU wrote to the San Diego Unified School District in response to a report by The Watchdog that highlighted how fees for uniforms, spirit packs, gym clothes, cheerleading outfits and other items persisted despite a district policy saying such charges violate the state Constitution’s guarantee of free schooling.

[If you'd like to read the letters the ACLU sent to Poway, Grossmont and San Dieguito school districts there are downloadable PDFs of them on the same page as the Watchdog article.]

Corey G. Johnson, a reporter for CaliforniaWatch who specializes in K-12 education, notes that this is not a fresh issue. He has been reporting on it since early this year:

As we wrote in February and in June, numerous instances of school districts disregarding this law has surfaced. Earlier this month, ACLU legal director David Blair-Loy sent the San Diego Unified School District a letter asking for officials to stop several examples of ‘pay to play’ that were found at local schools. The group also asked for the money collected to be refunded to the parents.

The request followed a San Diego Union-Tribune investigation that found schools openly charging fees on their websites, despite a recent local grand jury investigation that slammed the practice.

San Diego superintendent Bill Kowba agreed that the practice was wrong and said the district will cease charging the fees and offer refunds where appropriate.

Situations like these need to be brought into legal compliance. The socialization entailed by extracurricular activities is an important part of childhood development, and access to them is already protected by law.

Source: “ACLU takes school fee effort north and east,” Sign On San Diego Watchdog blog, 08/18/10
Source: “More schools accused of pay-to-play catch ACLU’s gaze,” California Watch, 08/23/10
Image by House of Sims, used under its Creative Commons license.

It is no secret that American schools are in deep trouble. Programs touting major turnarounds in the system seem to pop up regularly in urban and rural areas everywhere. No Child Left Behind (NCLB)  is one of those programs, one which has received both positive and negative press. Today, we are going to take a quick look at one of NCLB’s early attempts: The San Diego Unified School District‘s short-lived “Blueprint for Student Success.” A new evaluation of that program has been released by the Public Policy Institute of California, addressing the ongoing debate about that program’s effectiveness.

The Blueprint for Student Success ran from 2000 to 2005. It included a variety of  interventions: pedagogical coaches for teachers, extended school days and school years for students in schools with low reading performance, summer intensives for those with poor English skills, and double- or triple-length English periods. High sounding words indeed, but what reality did the program leave in its wake?

Reporter Sarah Sparks, who has covered the education beat for over five years, reports on in her article in Education Week:

San Diego’s turnaround story had all the hallmarks we’ve come to know: high-profile superintendent Alan Bersin and his New York City transplant-turnaround specialist Anthony Alvarado pushed wholesale changes; a furious teachers union protested the ‘my way or the highway’ terms; parents feared the intensity would frustrate and disengage students and the reading focus would hamstring students’ progress in other core subjects. After budget cuts and a school board election shake-up, funding for the blueprint programs dried up and Bersin was driven out a year before his contract expired.

Yet five years later, University of California, San Diego economics professor Julian Betts and his team have released a calm, nuanced evaluation of both the interventions’ effectiveness and the validity of the criticisms that led to its demise. The researchers found the interventions did not lead to lower scores in math, though they did lead to high school students taking fewer foreign language courses. The programs did not cause more students to miss school or drop out. And the overall effectiveness was a mixed bag.

Betts states that the program was quite effective at the elementary school level, although extremely expensive. Results that showed up to a cumulative 12.6% increase were found in the middle school programs. Great news when viewed in a vacuum, but lets pull back a bit and take a slightly wider perspective. Sparks continues:

Moreover, [Betts] thought many of the ‘quite significant gains’ made in elementary and middle school would have been ‘eroded away by the negative effects in high school.’  The same programs so effective in lower grades — extended-session literacy block and core — actually brought down reading achievement for students in high school; for English learners, in particular, the block periods were associated with a drop of 4.9 percentile points a year.

The irony? Early budget cuts meant the extra funding and extended-year portions were cut from the blueprint after only a few years, while the detrimental extended sessions in high school stayed around for years.

That certainly changes the perspective now, doesn’t it?

Source: “Autopsy of a Turnaround District,” Education Week, 08/19/10
Image by dullhunk, used under its Creative Commons license.

HUMANE EXPOSURES offers a penetrating look at society’s disenfranchised, questioning how long we can ignore the broken segments of our population, and at what cost. To aid in that endeavor, we have now launched our new YouTube channel, on which we will be sharing a wide variety of film clips and resources.

In The Fisher King, there is a scene with Tom Waits playing a disabled and homeless veteran. As he sits in his wheelchair, tin cup extended, he explains to Jeff Bridges’ character that “they’re paying so they don’t have to look.” It is a scene that really makes you think about how many things pass through your field of vision every day that you just don’t see. How many times have we assuaged your conscience with a few well-placed coins, and put it out of your mind? Probably so often that it escapes our notice that it’s not an object but a fellow human being that we’re “not seeing.”

Take a moment to recapture these escaped visions, look through the window we present to see a whole new world that exists uneasily in the same space as the one we walk through every day. For instance, how many people that walk past this man have actually noticed his amazing affinity for birds?

Video is a powerful tool for education. Seeing actual people and hearing their words often has a far greater impact than reading plain text. One proponent of this approach is Mark Horvath, whose work was featured this last Sunday on the front page of Google (as reported by The Huffington Post):

Activist and frequent HuffPost blogger Mark Horvath has dedicated years of his life to telling stories of the homeless through video (and an active twitter account @hardlynormal).

Despite an active following, Horvath’s message hasn’t quite made it into the mainstream. That’ll change this Sunday, when Horvath will be taking over YouTube’s homepage ‘with videos that smash stereotypes about America’s most forgotten citizens.’

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how many is a video worth?

Source: “YouTube Dedicates Homepage To Homelessness On Sunday, August 22,” The Huffington Post, 08/20/10
Image by OliBac, used under its Creative Commons license.

Pennsylvania has had its woes when it comes to its juvenile justice system. One of the worst and highest profile problems it has suffered was the much publicized “Cash for Kids” scandal. Here is a condensed rundown via Wikipedia, in case you missed it on the news:

[Judge Mark] Ciavarella pled guilty on February 13, 2009, pursuant to a plea agreement, to federal charges of honest services fraud, wire fraud and tax evasion in connection with receiving $2.6 million in kickbacks from Robert Powell and Robert Mericle, the co-owner and builder respectively, of two private, for-profit juvenile facilities. More specifically, the crimes charged were: conspiracy to deprive the public of the ‘intangible right of honest services,’ or corruption, and conspiracy to defraud the United States by failing to report income to the Internal Revenue Service. Ciavarella tendered his resignation to Governor Ed Rendell on January 23, 2009, prior to official publication of the charges.

What we would like to look at today is the repercussions of the scandal. In the aftermath of this hijacking of the justice system, the state of Pennsylvania is scrutinizing its handling of juvenile cases. The 10-year run of harsh sentences and unconstitutional rulings has inspired the formation of a task force composed of state advocates and county officials. Its aim? To overhaul the PA juvenile court system.

Michael Sisak, a staff writer for The Standard Speaker, has penned a nice article about the latest efforts. He writes:

Juveniles no longer appear in court without an attorney. Prosecutors, not court employees in the juvenile probation office, determine criminal charges. And infractions on school campuses are no longer painted with the same broad brush of ‘zero tolerance’ that guaranteed placement at a juvenile detention facility for even the most minor offenses.

‘Every case is going to be looked at individually, and those cases that do come through the system are going to be treated on an individual basis,’ District Attorney Jackie Musto Carroll said Wednesday, after a two-hour meeting with the task force at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre.

Sisak’s article is well worth the read, as he examines the steps being taken in detail. Importantly, he looks at both the pros and the cons to provide a balanced picture of the state of affairs. Among other things, he notes the slightly frosty reception of the local school administrators on the subject of ending “zero tolerance.” Their stated position in a meeting with the members of the Juvenile Justice Victim Response Task Force was that the change in policy engender a perception of weakness in their response to school violence.

What do you think? Can Pennsylvania pick up the pieces of its juvenile justice system? Is it on the right track in the approach it is taking to doing so? Let us know, we love comments!

Source: “Juvenile system changes take hold,” StandardSpeaker.com, 08/18/10
Image by steakpinball, used under its Creative Commons license.

One of the persistent issues in the American penal system is that it is massively overcrowded. A plethora of reasons for this abounds, as a simple Google search will show. The solutions have been in shorter supply.

Graeme Wood, a contributing editor for The Atlantic magazine, has a very interesting column in the September issue (available to us now courtesy of the magazine’s website). In it, he looks at the concept of “turning prison inside out” by using electronic surveillance. For those of you who recall the ankle unit worn by Martha Stewart after her trial, that is the kind he talks about.

Should we bring more inmates out of prisons and into society — if they can be properly monitored with an ankle device? Will this have a positive, tangible effect on recidivism? On prison overpopulation? As crime rates have gone down, the average sentence term has grown longer, leaving our penal system overloaded with inmates.

This would not be as large of an issue if inmates were reformed. Unfortunately, that is rarely the case, as Wood notes:

But that isn’t the case either: half of those released are back in prison within three years. Indeed, research by the economists Jesse Shapiro of the University of Chicago and M. Keith Chen of Yale indicates that the stated purpose of incarceration, which is to place prisoners under harsh conditions on the assumption that they will be ‘scared straight,’ is actively counterproductive. Such conditions — and U.S. prisons are astonishingly harsh, with as many as 20 percent of male inmates facing sexual assault — typically harden criminals, making them more violent and predatory. Essentially, when we lock someone up today, we are agreeing to pay a large (and growing) sum of money merely to put off dealing with him until he is released in a few years, often as a greater menace to society than when he went in.

It would seem that finding alternatives to incarceration makes good economic sense. Could the use of devices like this allow us to ease the pressure on our strained-to-bursting jails and prisons? Wood outlines a tripod of benefits from using the tracking devices, summed up at the end of the following excerpt from his article:

Devices such as the ExacuTrack, along with other advances in both the ways we monitor criminals and the ways we punish them for their transgressions, suggest a revolutionary possibility: that we might turn the conventional prison system inside out for a substantial number of inmates, doing away with the current, expensive array of guards and cells and fences, in favor of a regimen of close, constant surveillance on the outside and swift, certain punishment for any deviations from an established, legally unobjectionable routine. The potential upside is enormous. Not only might such a system save billions of dollars annually, it could theoretically produce far better outcomes, training convicts to become law-abiders rather than more-ruthless lawbreakers. The ultimate result could be lower crime rates, at a reduced cost, and with considerably less inhumanity in the bargain. [Emphasis ours.]

It is a good argument, and Wood presents a lot of upsides to the approach. Still, there are also all the issues endemic to a surveillance society a well. An argument could be made that this is a slippery slope, with the increasing usage possibly hiding just below the horizon.

As it happens often with social justice issues, benefits must be weighed against the more Orwellian factors when considering this situation. Which side do you find more logical? Let us know, leave a comment!

Source: “Prison Without Walls,” The Atlantic, 09/10
Image copyright Susan Madden Lankford, from the book “Maggots in my Sweet Potatoes: Women Doing Time.” Used with permission.

So, what is Common Ground doing? How is it providing a roof to some of the most vulnerable homeless on the streets?

Kara A. Mergl, Director of Research and Evaluation at Common Ground, writes the following on the 100,000 Homes blog:

I guess you can say it all began back in 2003 when Common Ground began piloting its Street-to-Home method. West Midtown Manhattan and the Times Square area of NYC certainly did not look the same back then as they do now.  The program’s major strides were made between 2005, when Becky Kanis made her first NPR appearance, and 2007, when the number of homeless in Times Square decreased by 87%; from 55 street homeless down to just 7. Today, there is only one remaining homeless individual still sleeping on the streets. New York City’s Department of Homeless Services recognized the success of this method and in 2007 deployed it across all five boroughs. The question remained, however, if this method would succeed outside of New York City.

The ability to replicate results is important. Common Ground’s expanded efforts yeilded tangible and positive results in a variety of urban areas, including Los Angeles County:

Other communities, such as Denver, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., began to take notice. One of the first partnerships around this method was with Los Angeles County and Project 50. Project 50, championed by supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, brought together 24 public and private agencies with the shared goal of identifying and housing the 50 most vulnerable homeless individuals living on the streets of Skid Row. At the one-year anniversary of the initial registry, by all measures, Project 50 was a success; 49 individuals housed and an 88% retention rate.

The LA effort proceeded one person at a time. Maurice Lewis was the first people to be handed a key through the program. Aged 54, Lewis had been living on the streets for about a year when he was approached. He said he had spent years “drinkin’ and druggin’,” and also he had heard voices periodically.

The LA Times reporter Christopher Goffard did a great four-part series on these efforts, from which we glean the rundown — in plain English — on how the program works from the standpoint of someone being aided by it:

The terms of Project 50 were explained to him: We have a room for you, your very own. You don’t have to see a shrink. You don’t have to attend substance abuse counseling. All that’s required is that 30% of your income — in Lewis’ case, a $221 monthly general relief check from the county — go toward rent.

The effort is far from over. As the next stage begins, teams of volunteer with be registering the homeless in San Diego. Applying the Plan to End Chronic Homelessness, prepared by the United Way in 2006, is the next step. Training sessions will be held for almost 150 members of the community and civic leaders during the week of September 19.

This training will prepare them for the three consecutive days of pre-dawn excursions onto the streets, during which they will survey and talk with the homeless. The data collected will be used to ID the most vulnerable of that population and get them into housing over the weeks or months following the survey.

If you are interested in more information or in volunteering to assist with the survey, you can check out the San Diego Clean and Safe website.

Source: “Project 50: Four walls and a bed,” LA Times, 08/01-07/10
Image copyright Susan Madden Lankford, from the book “downTown USA: A Personal Journey with the Homeless.” Used with permission.