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SOCIOLOGY
AT HOME WITH
THE HOMELESS
Each day Bill, a homeless man addicted to heroin, helps his girlfriend, Mary, shoot up. He introduced Mary--formerly addicted only to crack--to the drug.
Larry has a name for the swollen discolored vein on his left arm: Old Faithful; no matter how many time he injects it with heroin, he can always find it again.
Sally "flies signs," as the homeless call it--she panhandles by holding up a cardboard sign that says Single Mom. It's true--her 14-year-old son lived with her on the streets until just recently.
Mark Lettiere, a sociology graduate student at UC Davis, will miss them all. For four months this summer and fall, he lived with them in a homeless encampment in San Francisco.
For the past two years, Lettiere has conducted a series of interrelated studies of this population. He is looking at methods of HIV transmission among the homeless in a project funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, and he is studying the relationship between drug abuse, homelessness and crime for his dissertation and a book he plans to write.
During the first year of his project, Lettiere lived in an apartment near an encampment in the Warehouse District in San Francisco where several hundred homeless people live under the freeways and in the bushes, and he visited the area daily. In June he immersed himself in this other world, living with the homeless on the streets. This allowed him to acquire information that no outsider ever could.
"Life on the street is about hustling--hustling everyone," said Lettiere, referring to this culture's use of duplicity as a survival skill. "So I wasn't immune to that. I was hustled in countless ways. But when they weren't honest, I'd see that, because I was there."
And Lettiere was honest with them--he told them who he was and what he was doing,
and found that the homeless accepted him completely. He had no trouble gathering information; the people liked to talk about themselves and he, as he says, was there.
"I was involved in the most tedious, mundane dimensions of their lives as well as the most
astonishingly dangerous," he said. "Some of it would absolutely bore you out of your skull: just sitting around while someone is nodding from a heroin-induced high. But I was also there when people overdosed--and when people died."
Lettiere tried to avoid being present during most criminal activities, but--because of the nature of his research--he was there when they bought, sold and used drugs. He walked a fine line between attempting to help them--discouraging their risky needle practices, driving them to the hospital, giving them money for food--while remaining in the role of an unobtrusive observer.
It was an eye-opening lesson. Lettiere learned that, among this homeless population, more than 70 percent have chronic substance abuse problems, chiefly heroin addiction--and that it is this addition that has led to their predicament. This hasn't been understood clearly by either the political left or right in this country, he says. "The two dominant discourses are that these people are worthy victims or they are sociopaths. Well, they are both and they are neither."
The homeless themselves blame the drug for their predicament, and Lettiere believes that they come closer to a clear understanding of the situation than do the liberals who blame society or the conservatives who blame the individual.
In another insight into this population, Lettiere has found that the commission of crime breaks very sharply along racial lines and appears to be prompted in part by institutionalized racism. Whites, he has found, can easily acquire day-labor jobs to support their drug habits. Blacks are not given those same opportunities so more frequently turn to crime--shoplifting, breaking into cars or, most often, stealing building materials from construction sites.
Lettiere hopes an increased understanding of the cause and nature of the problems faced by the homeless can lead to a more-informed social policy and a better life for this most destitute of America's people. He advocates, for example, neither criminalizing nor legalizing drugs, but "medicalizing" them--considering addiction a medical problem, not a criminal problem.
"There are no technocratic quick fixes, no one magic bullet that is going to solve the homeless dilemma, but clearly there are things that we could do."
Now, as Lettiere completes the information-gathering portion of his studies and moves on to data analysis and writing--and back to his own home--he finds it very difficult to leave behind these people he has come to care about.
"If you were to walk by these people you might be scared to death of them, but they have the same human dimensions as you and I, and I got to see that. I didn't expect that pulling out of the project would be this painful."
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