13th: 12/14/11: Intake: BPHC shelter: More harassment/less harassment/abuse of and by the system

Recorded 12/14/11 @ 7:50 p.m.

  More harassment at:  

Intake shelter

The “Caution fence” is a few feet wide and a few feet tall; it’s more like an orange and white striped sign.

Followed by an employee of Intake, with a broom and dustpan.

Harassed by homeless guy.

Harassed by another employee of Intake.

Harassed by another homeless guy.

All of this happened within 2 hours.

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I slept in the cafeteria of Intake last night, on the floor, along with some other homeless women.  The beds in the dorm were full by the time I got there.

I was expecting a lot more harassment that night, but there wasn’t that much, once I got upstairs.  I made this recording on the first floor, while I was waiting with the other women who were waiting to go up to the cafeteria.

There was some coughing, at the beginning of the night, and then some more in the morning, more noticeably by a male staffmember than by a guest, but it was much better.  I don’t know how it would have been in the dorm.

One thing I saw this morning was a female staffmember yelling at another guest a few feet away from me.  The guest in question was someone who had spent all of the night that I’d seen passed out while hunched over, and wasn’t exactly up to full speed.

If there have been a lot of guests who could sleep comfortably through the harassment on other nights when it was terrible, much of that probably has to do with the fact that they are drunk and/or on illegal and/or prescription drugs.  There are some shelters where you’re not supposed to be drunk or on illegal drugs, but first of all, that rule obviously doesn’t get followed by all of the guests, and second of all, they are allowed to have prescription drugs.  They’re not supposed to be abusing prescription drugs, but a lot of them are on sleep medication, or medication that has been cross-prescribed for sleep.  Seroquel is one of those medications; I hear that get mentioned a lot.  It’s an antipsychotic; there’s no reason that it should be getting prescribed just for sleep, especially because it can have serious side effects and is very uncomfortable to stop taking, if you’re getting it out of your system after you’ve been on it for a while.

There are times when there are fewer guests in the shelters; that’s often after they’ve gotten their checks from the government and have gone to stay in hotels until their money starts to run out.

None of that is any reason for that woman to have been getting yelled at the way she was.  The people who sleep in the cafeteria have to get up earlier than the people in the dorm, and she looked like she was helpless in the grip of whatever she’s going through.  I was several blocks away from Intake by the time I made my first recording THIS morning, December 15, 2011, and that was at 5:38 a.m., as I’ll write in the next podcast.

There is a lot of abuse in the homeless system; abuse of guests, from the physical conditions of the facilities themselves to the way that staff are allowed to treat them, and abuse of the welfare system by a lot of the guests.  There’s a lot of money that’s not going where it should, like toward better facilities and higher standards for training and education of people who work with the homeless, which would necessitate paying those employees more.

 

Copyright L. Kochman, December 15, 2011 @ 2:22 p.m. (I'll put another "no code" here.  I shouldn't have to do that by now, and maybe I don't have to do that by now, but I'm doing it anyway.  It's not something I plan to make a habit of, because I've already talked about the "time code zone" issue a lot, but I'll do it this time @ 2:23 p.m.  NO CODE!!)

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December 15, 2011

Despite the fact that there was less harassment last night, I didn’t get very much sleep.  They leave the light on in the cafeteria all night, which perhaps also has always reduced some of the harassment because people can’t hide who they are when they’re doing it but is nevertheless not the easiest thing to sleep under.  There were no blankets so I slept in my coat and there were no pillows.  I also was very wound up, waiting with each second to hear if the harassment would start as soon as I relaxed at all.  I maybe got a few hours of sleep. 

Copyright L. Kochman, December 15, 2011 @ 3:29 p.m./Fine, I'll put another "no code" here, at no code 3:30 p.m..  I don't want to do this all day at 3:31 p.m. No Code...

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the sound of real screaming, the screaming of being driven crazy by the conglomerate....I don't know how to indicate that sound, so I'll let people imagine how they would feel if it were happening to them, @ no code 3:32 p.m.