One hesitates to call this a paradox, because a paradox implies some unintended tension between two principles that a reasonable person might, upon reflection, reconcile. There is nothing to reconcile here. In Tennessee, sleeping in your vehicle on public property is a Class E felony carrying up to six years in prison. Domestic assault, by contrast, is a Class A misdemeanor with a maximum of eleven months, and you cannot be elevated to a felony charge until your third offense. The state has, with legislative deliberation, determined that the act of being poor in public warrants a harsher sanction than the act of hitting someone you live with. This is not a bug. It is the system operating precisely as designed.
The architecture behind this is worth tracing, because it did not emerge spontaneously. In June 2024, the Supreme Court decided City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, holding that enforcing public camping bans against involuntarily homeless people does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. The majority opinion, authored by Justice Gorsuch and joined by Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, reasoned that ordinances regulating camping on public property are “generally applicable” laws and therefore do not criminalize a status, merely an act. Justice Sotomayor, joined by Kagan and Jackson, dissented. The distinction between status and conduct, as any first-year constitutional law student can tell you, traces back to Robinson v. California (1962), which held that criminalizing addiction itself was impermissible. The Gorsuch opinion effectively narrows Robinson to the point of practical irrelevance for unhoused people, because the Court frames the use of a blanket as “camping” rather than as the unavoidable consequence of being human and cold.
w_lemay (CC BY-SA 2.0) via Wikimedia CommonsWhat followed was predictable to anyone who studies municipal governance. Cities from San Francisco to Los Angeles to Colorado Springs expanded their camping bans to cover vehicles, RVs, and overnight parking. Tennessee went further, making public camping a felony. The ACLU, which has been tracking the post-Grants Pass landscape, warns that a single citation can trigger a cycle of fines, impoundment, and legal debt that makes escaping homelessness structurally impossible. This is not hyperbole. When your car is your shelter and the state impounds it, you lose both your shelter and your mobility in a single administrative action. The literature on homelessness and criminal justice is quite clear on this point: criminalizing poverty increases poverty. It does not reduce it.
Meanwhile, the domestic assault comparison is not merely rhetorical. In California, misdemeanor domestic battery carries up to one year in county jail, with probation available for first-time offenders. In Texas, a Class A misdemeanor assault carries up to a year. These are, by any reasonable moral framework, violent acts against a person. Sleeping in a car is not a violent act. It is not an act against a person. It is the absence of an alternative. The Tennessee legislature, which presumably had access to this information, chose nonetheless to tier the penalties as it did.
Vitaliy Haiduk / PexelsWhat we are observing is the logical endpoint of a policy framework that treats housing as a commodity and homelessness as a nuisance. The Supreme Court provided the constitutional permission slip. State legislatures provided the penalties. Municipalities provided the enforcement. And the people sleeping in their cars, who in many cases are employed but priced out of a rental market that has decoupled entirely from wage growth, provided the bodies. The system is not broken. It is functioning with admirable efficiency toward an end that ought to disturb anyone who has read the Eighth Amendment and understood it.
One grows tired of having to explain that criminalizing survival is not a housing policy. But here we are, again.