With his sweatshirt hood up and hand warmers tucked in his gloves, Jason Sargent tried to fight off the cold.
Sargent, 42, sat alone outside of a coffee shop on a cold Monday morning. He’s been homeless for a year.
Sargent didn’t know that two blocks away, at the Indiana Statehouse, politicians have been debating how long he could stay on that downtown sidewalk. Republican lawmakers are thinking about making it illegal to use public land for sleeping
and camping.
“It would be horrible,” Sargent said.
People who support the so-called camping ban say it would address what they see as the worsening problem of homelessness.
“It is not compassionate to allow our neighbors to die on the streets,” the bill’s author, Sen. Cyndi Carrasco, R-Indianapolis, said during a committee meeting in January.
Opponents, though, see the bill as an attempt from an out-of-state think tank to criminalize homelessness less than a year after the launch of a program that has housed nearly 90 people who were living on Indianapolis streets.
“Please don’t inhibit our progress,” Sen. Greg Taylor, D-Indianapolis, said before senators voted down his amendment that would have explicitly protected the program.
Taylor was referencing Streets to Home Indy, an initiative to get people into housing with services such as rent help and mental health treatment. The goal is to get roughly 300 people housed by this summer.
Carrasco said she supports Streets to Home, and those who want a ban say the law could complement the program. Carrasco, through a spokesperson, did not respond to an interview request.
But some see a timing problem.
It takes an average of 26 days to get someone housed through Streets to Home.
If the camping ban becomes law, people experiencing homelessness would first get a warning and then have 48 hours to leave.
Under Senate Bill 285, a person in Sargent’s position would face a Class C misdemeanor. That could mean up to 60 days in jail and a $500 fine, after the warning period from law enforcement.
Other states and cities have passed similar bans. In Kentucky, more than 400 people were charged within the first year of a statewide camping ban. Denver has had a ban in place since 2022.
In Indiana, a person would have 48 hours to move at least 300 feet away. Supporters of the ban say that would make it harder for encampments to form. And officers would provide information about resources.
The Coalition for Homelessness Intervention and Prevention, which leads Streets to Home, is opposed to the bill.
Chelsea Haring-Cozzi, the organization’s CEO, said Carrasco has listened to concerns about how the ban would impact Streets to Home. After the Senate committee meeting, Carrasco authored an amendment to make it clear that cities could still have a program to provide housing instead of a citation or arrest.
“People genuinely care about this issue,” Haring-Cozzi said.
The Indiana Sheriffs’ Association is against the bill. Stephen Luce, the executive director, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he’s worried about jail overcrowding. In Indianapolis, crowded jails are a concern already because of people detained for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“I don’t want to see the jail be the final resting place for these people,” Luce said.
Another concern: Putting a misdemeanor charge on someone’s record can make it less likely that a landlord accepts them as a renter.
“We don’t want to create legal barriers to actually housing these folks,” Taylor Hughes, chief strategy officer for Indy Chamber, said at the committee meeting.
Still, the chamber is in support of the bill. Hughes told Mirror Indy that homelessness is the top issue for the chamber’s members, with concerns ranging from safety to worry for the well-being of people living outside. The chamber has a spot on Mayor Joe Hogsett’s Leadership Council on Homelessness and advocated for a planned low-barrier homeless shelter.
Rachael Sample, senior community leadership officer for housing and homelessness at the Indianapolis Foundation, told Mirror Indy that threats of fines and jail time are counterproductive. The foundation has committed $2.7 million to support Streets to Home.
“Anything that takes focus away from housing people makes all of this work more challenging,” Sample said.
The camping ban is being promoted by the Cicero Institute, a conservative think tank based in Texas. The organization has a fill-in-the-blank model bill for a camping ban on its website.
“It doesn’t sit well for a Texas-based think tank to come to Indiana with a one-size-fits-all approach,” Haring-Cozzi said.
The Cicero Institute was behind a similar proposal last year in Indiana. That legislation didn’t pass amid concerns it was being tagged onto another bill late in the process. But the issue hasn’t gone away, in part because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2024 that cities can ban people from sleeping and camping in public places.
Paul Webster, a senior fellow at the Cicero Institute, said he thinks Senate Bill 285 doesn’t criminalize homelessness.
“The bill is a compassionate measure for people living in public spaces in Indiana,” he said during the committee meeting.
Webster told Mirror Indy he knows some critics don’t like that the Cicero Institute is involved in shaping laws around the country. But he said his goal is to provide solutions.
“I don’t think much of it,” Webster said.
Senate Bill 285 passed out of the Senate largely along party lines in January.
The bill has been assigned to the House Courts and Criminal Code Committee but hadn’t been scheduled for a hearing as of Feb. 3.
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This story was originally published by Mirror Indy and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
