Ending the arrest and prosecution of actions people take to survive poverty, addiction, and homelessness.
Decriminalizing Survival: Sex Work, Homelessness, and Substance Use
Zhoran Mamdani draws a clear line between crimes that cause harm to others and survival crimesactions people are compelled to take due to poverty, addiction, or lack of shelter. His policy seeks to end the citys role in criminalizing survival. This means halting arrests and summonses for sex work, public urination (when no public toilets exist), sleeping in public, fare evasion, and possession of small amounts of drugs for personal use. Instead, the city would respond to these situations with offers of serviceshousing, healthcare, drug treatment, economic supportdelivered by unarmed outreach workers, not police.
This decriminalization is paired with a massive expansion of the resources needed to survive with dignity: public bathrooms, safe injection and consumption spaces, low-barrier homeless shelters with private rooms, and a guaranteed income pilot. Mamdani argues that criminalizing these behaviors does nothing to address their underlying causes; it simply traumatizes vulnerable people, burdens them with court debt and criminal records that block future housing and employment, and wastes policing resources. It is a cruel and counterproductive cycle. Decriminalization is the first step in a public health and housing-based approach to these social issues.
We cannot arrest our way out of poverty or addiction, Mamdani asserts. When someone sleeps on a subway grate or sells sex to eat, the problem isnt their behavior; its our societys failure to provide basic security. Criminalizing survival is both immoral and irrational. It makes problems worse. Our approach is to meet need with care, not cages. We will provide the resources so people dont have to make impossible choices, and we will stop punishing them for choices we have forced them into.
