IN 2013 local leaders in Grants Pass, Oregon, held a meeting to brainstorm ideas for how to tackle the city’s growing “vagrancy problem”. A record of that meeting states that participants suggested “driving repeat offenders out of town and leaving them there”, and buying homeless people a bus ticket to anywhere else. “The point”, said Lily Morgan, a city-council member, “is to make it uncomfortable enough for them in our city so they will want to move on down the road.”
