

Department of Agriculture emphasizes this principle by regularly releasing a list of stores caught buying stamps for cash. Providing cash to buy alcohol, cigarettes, and other nonfood items that encourage addictions rather than basic nutrition is exactly what the food-stamp program is designed to prevent. The stores then share the difference with the runners. They will shepherd willing recipients to nearby stores that pay 80 percent of the stamps' face value. Then they service their clients by taking turns sitting inside the HRS office - near a sign warning that food- stamp trafficking is a state crime - and soliciting recipients as they leave the stamp windows, in full view of HRS staff and a security guard. every day, when the office opens, to use the bathrooms and set up shop under a shade tree in the adjacent alley.

(Florida's HRS is responsible for determining eligibility and administering the federal food stamp program.) But that is no problem for Jay and the band of other homeless people who pursue an active trade in cash-for-food stamps at their business address: the HRS office at Sixth Street and Alton Road in Miami Beach. Only a few minutes earlier, she left the state Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services office a few blocks away screaming at Jay that she needed a drink and he had better cash some food stamps to pay for it.īuying and selling food stamps for cash is illegal under state and federal law. Her fist is full of cash and she is babbling happy talk. She gives the market's clerk a big smile, her head flopping from side to side in the manner of an incurable alcoholic.
FOOD STAMPS MIAMI SKIN
Jay's girlfriend, a short, emaciated woman with blotched skin from too many hours living homeless under the sun, walks up to the clerk at a small South Beach market and loudly drops six quarts of beer on the counter.
