Two days this week I went downtown and saw some of the same homeless people I usually do. Now, I am not a psychologist nor I have ever spent much time with these people. But one thing is clear for any amount of interaction is that they are mentally ill if not flat out nuts. This guy by the library has a cell phone that looks about five years old and is missing the battery, but he still seems to hold conversations on the phone. I think this probably a sign that there is something wrong with him. I think this guy and others like him should be locked up either in a mental institution or a low level security facility.
Here is my reasoning:
These homeless people scare people. I know parents that will not use that branch of the library because they afraid of the homeless people.
Many of these people are sick and need help. It is not compassionate to just leave people with mental problems out on the street. I do not know what it is like where you live but it is fucking cold here. Fucking cold is when the wind chill is 5. below 0.
If they are not sick, they are lazy. You can find a job in this country. One only needs to look at the success of so many hard working immigrants that have no experience in out economy and sometimes cannot even speak the language when they start out. And if not I hear the military is looking for people.
If they can be helped they can become productive members of society. But this will require a radical break.
They are annoying. I do not want to be asked for spare change. They stink - really bad in summer.
They are dangerous. The homeless commit crime at a high rate.
We are having a society here. These people need to live up their responsibilities and get off the street or we should get them off the street.
So, do you think we should institutional the homeless to help the sick ones and punish the lazy or should we continue to the current situation?
For 10 years I worked across the street from one homeless shelter, a block down from the other and across fom the public library that was the biggest magnet of all. So I’ve interacted with my share of the homeless.
Yeah, they can be scary, but that in itself is not a crime.
Around here when it gets cold, both the shelters and the police send drivers around to try and get them into the shelters. A fair percentage of them don’t want to sleep in shelters, but that’s their choice.
A lot of them are not particularly employeable. If they’re sick, they’re sick. If they’re lazy, they’ll be out of work again soon. Again, that in itself is not a crime.
I agree with the “if” part.
There are a lot of people in a given area who are annoying. Again, not a crime.
I’m going to ask for a cite. I know the homeless are disprportionate victims of crime, but not that they are disproportionately responsible for crime.
Part of society is the right to be left alone as long as you aren’t endangering someone else.
I’ll agree that as a society, America doesn’t do a good job of helping those who want help. But that’s a long way from throwing someone in jail because you find them annoying, lazy and scary.
You have no idea what you’re talking about, here. Any whiff of mental illness on a job application and you might as well give it up. I had tried for years to get an interview for a McJob, but no such luck. Sure it’s against the ADA, but what’s the point? If I sue, it would be a years long process. If win, I get a nominal award, which is split with the lawyer, and at the end of the day - I got a McJob. :dubious:
As it’s not exactly legal to lock people up without a hearing in America, the red tape to formally institutionalize them all would be a nightmare, not to mention finding places to put them. Plus I’m not sure what it takes to institutionalize someone against their will; it’s not illiegal to talk to a dead telephone, after all.
And I’m not sure I agree that as easy as all that to get work in america - at least, work that’ll get a person properly off the streets. Or that homeless people aren’t a part of society.
The OP starts OK, but mixes in the bit about a job.
If we keep this to the truly mentally ill folks, we still have a problem:
HOW ill is enough to warrant giving the government the right to lock you up? The DSM IV can be used to classify way too many people as mentally ill in some way or another. Diagnosing mental disorders is not as easy as a blood test.
Now, I am not saying that the mentally ill guy talking into the broken cell is not nuts - but after we lock him up, who do we look for out there?
For an interesting take on one mentally ill person, read Steve Lopez’s work at the LA Times. Or, just wait for the movie:
This is near the crux of it for me. While I may agree with some of your other points (I think selfishness and poor character are intertwined with mental problems for a lot of these people), avoiding those value judgments can allow a more dispassionate analysis. Either the vagrants can’t or won’t come close to playing their part under the social contract. It doesn’t matter (in terms of a practical solution) which is the case. Either way, they are taking up too much cultural space, violating the rule that your right to swing your fist (smell like piss, harass people, etc.) ends where my nose begins.
There is no easy answer (I would not want to live in an institution full of other bums, I will admit), but an easy answer was just what the idiot courts and social agencies were doing when they emptied the institutions and made it impossible to enforce vagrancy laws.
Just highlighted a couple of things to revert to my point that some of the things you say “aren’t a crime” or aren’t a basis for jailing [I think the OP also had in mind alternatively institutionalizing] people were crimes at one time and would be still in some jurisdictions, except that the courts decided they knew better than the voters and legislatures and decided to declare vagrancy, loitering, and no-visible-means-of-support laws unenforceable.
I suspect that given a chance, many Americans might way the respective rights and determine that fifteen urine soaked vagrants did not have the right effectively to render the downtown library in a city of 250,000 people, say, unusable (or markedly unpleasant to use) for the remaining 247,985 citizens.
So get a law passed that people can’t stink. If they are not breaking the law, I certainly am not going to support the notion that something must be done merely so that they do not offend certain people’s sensibilities.
That’s a good practical question. The de-institutionalization of the mad was not just motivated by loony feel-goodism. There was also the notion that it would save money. I don’t know if anyone has done a study to weigh the respective costs of institutionalizing or jailing those who can’t or won’t play by the rules vs. how we end up paying for them in the long run anyhow. It’d be hard, because what is the dollar value of [having a downtown library that your kids could actually use] or [encouraging businesses to have clean public restrooms that won’t be trashed by bums]? It is more than nil but how much more is hard to quantify.
If I pass that law, as the people of Morristown, N.J. did, will you support me when a federal judge (as he did) overturns it, fatuously declaring that “one man’s hay fever is another man’s ambrosia” to suggest that we really don’t have any way of knowing what “stink” really means? If all I need to do is gather majority consensus from my fellow citizens for reasonable restrictions on what will be deemed to be “taking up too much cultural space” (just as we do not allow people to blast Megadeth from their windows at 4:00 a.m., or walk into court shirtless, or watch porn in a public place), then sign me up. I think we’d quickly reach a reasonable level of agreement on a reasonable set of restrictions of Not Okay behavior. In fact, as I’ve noted, we already had such playground rules, but our Platonic Guardians decided they knew better.
Megadeath at 4:00 AM is legal. However, if a decibel meter runs over a certain point for any noise it becomes illegal. The issue is noise, it can be objectively measured, and it can be dealt with.
Shirtless is a dress code, and can be objectively measured as well.
Porn has had serious issues being regulated, as the definition of it is difficult.
Now, do you want to keep smells out of the library? How are you going to measure smell? Can the librarian chase down the rogue farters? Can we nail the folks with perfume? If they had the garlic and onion special are they banned? Is your Not OK Behavior for the smelly, or just the homeless smelly?
Is it your belief that the cops (a) do; or (b) must always get a decibel meter reading in order for sanction under such a law to be permissible? In fact, they do not, and we routinely allow officials reasonable discretion to judge what is and is not nuisance behavior.
This is the same slippery-slope argument that the judge in New Jersey used – just because the guy smells like feces is no reason to think that that’s going to offend people. And besides, how will we really know what feces smell like? [John Stuart Mill]“Any law whatever can be shown to work ill, if we suppose it to be conjoined with universal idiocy.”[/JSM]
By the way, discretion would indeed provide a reasonable basis for sanctioning a smelly bum in a manner or degree different from a smelly non-bum. Because tolerability is a sliding scale, the reasonable and prudent librarian could take into account that (a) the bum is likely to hang around longer than the businessman who just ate lunch at The Stinking Rose garlic restaurant and has popped by to return a book; (b) the bum’s stinkiness is less to be tolerated because he is not using the library for its intended purpose whereas the flatulent professor is; (c) IRL, most of us know that most perfume, annoying as it can be, smells less-bad than most fecal matter.
Smelly businessman dropping off a book - OK
Smelly professor - OK
Smelly bum - not OK. What if the bum is reading? Is he allowed to stay in the library?
Smelly woman with perfume - OK, as long as she is not a “bum.”
Now - HOW smelly do they have to be? Is one day from a shower too much? Can a construction worker come in off of the job site and read for bit?
I just want to know how you propose to enforce your “no smelly bums, but everyone else regardless of smell is ok” rule.