When you talk to people who are trying to find a way to get/stay high on their vices, they often only say "I need help" and when you start going "here's a bus pass, here's food and clothes, let's brainstorm where you can spend the night" you can see the impatience in them because they don't want THAT help, they need MONEY to get DRUNK like NOW. Even when I worked at the homeless shelter I had a crackhead bring me tools he stole from his employer and beg me to buy them off him for "any amount, a great deal" and when I said no, he offered to sell me his foodstamps. Next he flashed a (fake) gun to try to intimidate me and I said gtfo. He ran around telling everyone this same thing until eventually he got money for that rock. Pretty much every week a woman would offer sex for money or to "come home with me" because there's a real variety of homeless woman that stays housed by "going home" with random men.
Yes, it is a great way to get human trafficked.
It was a big policy argument at my shelter. We used to require people to get prior approval from their case worker to spend the night out. The new uberliberal boss thought that wasn't right and changed it so they merely had to call in and automatically were allowed to be out for the night: any amount of times.
The result was that we basically were providing free accomodations to prostitutes. Women that formerly were NOT going out at night because they would have had to face their social worker about it, now were going out at night. In general everyone started going out, sometimes a big cluster, and the policy was that we weren't even allowed to press them on it, couldn't say anything like "You guys are clearly all going out go do drugs together". It went from 1 or 2 people out per night to 20-30. And imagine you're sleeping outside on the waitlist for the shelter beds, and then at night half the shelter beds are actually empty because all those people are crashing at a trap house and only actually live in the shelter as a back up plan.
This only became an issue to my boss when, in 6 months time, our stats became abysmal as half the shelter was just bums with 0 intention of trying to get out of the shelter because they had thriving careers as drug dealers and hookers. So she changed to policy to be a strict 8 week stay and you had to apply for extensions every two weeks. This is very rough because 8 weeks is not enough time to get out of the gutter (our average successful stay [they got housed] was 5 months) and the extension process introduces a TON of bias as it boiled down to "does your social worker like you/believe in you?" A lot of people will discount it entirely and just assume from the get-go "This is an 8 week stay and then I'll have another shelter lined up afterward." In contrast our old policy was that you set measurable goals and had to show proof at each appointment you were actively trying to get housing/a job/sober/etc, no proof would start a 2 week clock until you had to go (or start showing change). I used to tell people at intake, "Wanting to improve is a condition of staying here and we all expect you to try to make good decisions." and my boss told me to no longer say this because it was "judgmental" and that it was, like, totally racist to expect black people to even be capable of change. That's really what it boiled down to at the end of the day, even though she was black. Her idea of helping was gimmedats and she didn't think it was morally just for the shelter to try to install its views. Views like "try to avoid selling your body for money" and "don't steal." It was all "how can we judge when 'they gotta do what they gotta do?' Society is already holding these people down- are we going to be another oppressor???" Ma'am he's selling fent in our parking lot.
There are shelters that try to change people, and there are shelters that merely keep people off the street for a few weeks as some sort of performance. I felt like my boss' policies changed the place towards the later. Also they paid me less than I would have made at McDonald's and when they hired new people, the new people that I had to train were hired on with higher wages than I made after a year. I felt like they spat on me.
2 tinctures. Literally not a drop of pain and I love it.