AUGUSTA (AP) – Amid reports of homeless Mainers being beaten, denied stable housing and ripped off by store clerks, Maine’s attorney general is launching a series of public sessions to hear from homeless victims of discrimination.

The first hearing will be held Monday in Portland, Attorney General Steven Rowe said. Follow-up hearings will be held Dec. 3 in Bangor, Dec. 7 in Alfred and Dec. 14 in Lewiston.

Rowe’s study stems from legislative inquiries last session into whether Maine needs to amend its human rights or civil rights acts to include protections from violence and discrimination for people who are homeless or perceived to be homeless.

One of the lawmakers raising the issue, Rep. Benjamin Dudley, D-Portland, said Thursday that he was prompted by reports from Preble Street, formerly known as Preble St. Resource Center, which operates a shelter as part of its services.

Preble Street’s advocacy director, Donna Yellen, said she has seen an increasing number of cases of violence and discrimination against homeless people in the past year.

“In the summer of 2003 we started seeing more and more people coming through our doors … with black eyes, broken wrists, with stories of being assaulted,” Yellen said.

“And it seems like the only reason why they were being targeted, harassed and sometimes assaulted was because they were homeless, because they had a backpack, because they were walking by themselves in a park at night, because they were sitting in front of the library on a Sunday night,” said Yellen.

Homeless people who set up camps in some of Portland’s wooded areas have reported that their makeshift living quarters were trashed while they were gone during the day, Yellen said.

There are also reports of stores raising their prices for goods they sell to people who are homeless or perceived as such, she said.

Yellen also said some landlords have denied rental units to people who were using the Preble Street facility after learning through phone references on applications that the applicants were homeless.

Some homeless people have also lost out on job opportunities after prospective employers learned that the applicants had no permanent place to live.

Yellen said she has heard similar anecdotes from shelters in other parts of the state.

“People who are homeless have nowhere to hide. You and I can go inside our house and lock the door,” said Yellen. “They have nowhere to go.”

As part of the state’s study, Rowe’s office has conducted a statewide survey of agencies that serve the homeless as well as law enforcement agencies. Homeless and formerly homeless Mainers who want to relate their own experiences as part of the study may do so in writing before Dec. 15.

Results are to be reported to the Legislature early next year.

Any public policy action that might result from Rowe’s study could clash with public attitudes that blame homeless people’s own failures for their own plight.

“Increasingly, people believe that homelessness is caused by individual imperfections and moral failings,” says a 1998 report by the National Resource Center on Homelessness and Mental Illness.

It says mentally ill people and substance abusers “are seen as more blameworthy and less deserving of compassion than homeless people who are merely down on their luck.”‘

Reflecting that pattern, a number of states and cities are enacting anti-panhandling laws, which themselves may be discriminatory, according to Maria Foscarinis, executive director of the National Law Center on Homeless & Poverty.

A business person taking a nap on a bench won’t be arrested, but a homeless person will, she said.