Public Intoxication
By Albert B. Kelly
I’ve always maintained that the hardest governing is what gets done at the municipal level because there is no layer between municipal and the street. At the county level, you’ve got a municipality or a township between you and the street. If you’re at the state level, you can govern from the state capital and blame the local officials. As for the feds, we might as well be talking about the dark side of the Moon.
I am reminded of this almost daily as we wrestle with how to deal with public intoxication. Admittedly, this issue is closely tied to homelessness but with public intoxication, we’re talking about increasing numbers of individuals staggering around our public spaces hassling people for loose change, relieving themselves in public, and generally being loud and obnoxious and intimidating people who are just trying to go about their day.
We have always had a contingent of homeless among us just as we have always had those who struggle with some sort of substance abuse, but I don’t remember it ever being this bad on the street. I suspect that much of the problem stems from the onset of the pandemic and the decision to release thousands of individuals, all in the name of public health, who would have otherwise remained in jail or prison.
Once released, the flip side of that coin is what’s been done in the name of “reform”. I say this because the obvious response to the growing number of publically intoxicated individuals squatting in our public spaces and meandering through our streets would be strong enforcement at the local level. But State statutes make such enforcement exceedingly difficult.
N.J.S.A 26:2B-26 prohibits municipalities from adopting any type of ordinance or law that would make public intoxication a violation of the law. Furthermore, municipalities cannot impose fines for public intoxication and if we should have any laws that do, these can no longer be enforced.
As for why, N.J.S.A. 26:2B-7, states “It is the policy of the State of New Jersey that persons with an alcohol use disorder and intoxicated persons may not be subjected to criminal prosecution because of their consumption of alcoholic beverages, but rather should be afforded a continuum of treatment in order that they may lead lives as productive members of society.”
One official’s definition of a victim is another official’s definition of an offender. Where you stand largely depends on whether the problem is right there in your neighborhood or is far enough away so you don’t have to see it, smell it, side-step it, or clean-up after it.
Truth be told, when I see someone relieving themselves next to the ATM downtown and when local merchants are calling outraged because the riverfront looks like a cross between a bad keg party and a refugee camp, I’m not thinking about a “continuum of treatment” or imagining “productive lives”, I’d settle for them using a rest room.
As for the immediate problem, some might say the alternative is to focus enforcement on “disorderly conduct” or “public lewdness”, or some similar offense as opposed to public intoxication. Maybe, but do we really expect police to spend their time watching and waiting for a group of drunks to cross the magic line so that they might actually be able to enforce something? Regardless, they’ll be back on the street within hours.
I understand the intent behind these statutes, but the reality is that for years, jail and prison was how we dealt with mental illness, homelessness, substance abuse, and poverty. Whether we criminalized these problems or merely decided that this was what it meant to “institutionalize” these problems, jail and prison is what we did and we were good at justifying it.
The problem now is that we can’t just throw open the doors to the jails and prisons in the name of reform or in the spirit of social justice without thinking seriously about what we really need to tackle these issues and assume that we’re actually accomplishing anything.
What we’ve done is not solve these problems as much as localize them and we did it on the cheap, which never works. If we’re going to empty out the jails and prisons in the name of reform, then we need to invest serious money into building more homeless shelters, inpatient substance abuse programs, and mental health facilities to get people, with their complex problems, off our streets.