I just want to say that I stand with Ahunter3. I am offended, sickened and more than a little threatened. Thank Og the skirt-wearing, escaped schizophrenic can argue so well on this topic. Thank OG he has a job, or clearly Hueta88 and Two and a half inches of fun would completely disregard what he has to say.
Mr. Thompson, I notice you didn’t put a phone number on your application, or a address, and your dressed in rags and unshaven." :smack:
There is a small squat of homeless who live under the overpass I used to take to work. I think after long enough it breaks you. I wouldn’t doubt that most of them wouldn’t know how to act around polite society.
Every single public order law has a definition. Noise, nudity, littering - all can be objectively defined.
Once again, please define in a manner that can be legally codified, being a smelly bum. Given your stated preferences, be sure to NOT include anyone gainfully employed.
Read the book Scratch Beginnings. It tells the story of a man that went to city he did not know with $25 and achieved success.
Or look at the immigrants that come to this country with nothing and become a success.
And there are places where the homeless can clean up, shave, and get clean clothes.
I believe that would be a fallacy. Can you show that *anyone *with *any *skill set can make it *every *time if they work hard?
Also immigrants often have support structures, like large groups of other immigrants for instance. It’s absurd to assume that everyone who has failed is where they are because of laziness.
That said, once your homeless for a few months you probably lose the skills to interact with normal society. Looking at the ground, all twitchy, you know.
Without wanting to support Huerta88’s arguments, I think you’re mistaken. I believe that the various pornography and indecent exposure laws have huge problems with enforcement because they cannot be objectively defined. But we make the effort anyways.
There a support systems for people who are homeless and out of work. And not everyone will succeed every time. But they can keep trying. If they give up and start bothering people in blatant ways, they are not being a part of society and should be separated.
Being homeless does not make you stare at the ground and be all twitchy. That is mental illness.
And do you really think it is better to leave mentally ill people on the street than to take them into an institution and give them treatment?
My guess is that if we ran an IQ test on the author, we would find that he is well above the median. With his college education, he hits the top third of the nation in education. While he might not have put that on his job applications, his skills still would have helped him get noticed on the job. Finally, while he did all this vowing to not use the safety net - he DID have a safety net regardless. That little bit of knowledge make a huge difference in one’s mental state.
I can look at immigrants who make it - often with community support. I can also find plenty who fall.
Again - are we discussing the mentally ill, the unfortunate, the addicts, or the bums (to keep using the other poster’s term)?
Often the unfortunate can and do make it out. I have personally housed two different homeless women in my home, helping them re-establish themselves after very hard times hit them. Plenty of others do not get the same chance.
Some cities setup free voice mail for the homeless. It was hard to apply for a job when you didn’t have a phone number they could call. Job listings are often found… in the library! That same library that some here appear to want us to close to the homeless. A place to shower is available, but there is not always space. Those shelters are often in the worst parts of town, and not where the jobs are.
This is a complex issue that is not answered by either throw the smelly ones out, lock them all up, or that anyone can just bootstrap themselves.
Indecent exposure has been taken care of (Revealing one’s genitals under circumstances likely to offend others), but porn is still an issue - you are right.
Is it better to just leave addict and the mentally ill on the street or force them into treatment?
There are not enough support systems by any measure for the ones who want out. Just go look at the lines at the shelter nearest you if you want a feel for the scale.
Back to the mentally ill, I asked at the beginning of this how are you going to determine what is mentally ill enough to warrent locking someone up without their permission.
For the third time – cite?
Cite?
a) I’ve got a countercite, in the form of my own experience. Of course I am a person with a psych dx or two, so that kind of confuses the issue. Still, the circumstances & mental states that landed me my psychiatric labels predated me being a homeless person by a few years. I think I can speak of what the experience of homelessness itself can do to your mind set. Staring at the ground doesn’t seem an unlikely outcome. When you’re a homeless person, you interact a bit oddly with other people. In case you’ve never noticed it, the average person also interacts a bit oddly with homeless people. It’s reciprocal, and awkward all around.
b) As for “being all twitchy”, to the extent that it is correlated with mental illness, it’s because mental illness is correlated with psychiatric drugs which cause tardive dyskinesia as a permanent side effect. You see, the treatment that has been provided to the so-called “mentally ill” has often had the result of damaging the brains of the recipients. It has also often had the result, or lack of result, of failing in any way to make the recipient happier, more able to cope with things, or better prepared to integrate into society as an employable person.
c) It’s bad enough having no indoor refuge to call your own without those who do begrudging you the fucking sidewalks and alleys as well. It’s inconvenient to you to run into homeless people when you go downtown? Well, it’s kind of inconvenient to be homeless, too, dude. Not saying yours don’t count, but pardon my unsympathetic ass, you know? Don’t be so damn sure it couldn’t happen to you. Don’t be so damn arrogant as to think you’d find it easy to get back off the streets if it did.
I do not have one.
As a former psychiatric nurse I think it is pretty shameful that people who are obviously mentally ill are left to their own devices out on the street. Back when I was nursing (late 70s) there were certainly homeless people, but nowhere near as many and certainly not patently psychotic.
Back then Sydney had 4 large publicly funded psychiatric hospitals. I see people today, in parks and on the streets or at railway stations, that, back in my psych nursing days, would have been routinely deposited by the police at a psych admission centre.
They would be admitted, cleaned up, cared for, mostly stabilized on drugs and then returned to the community. Some would be admitted repeatedly over the years, some you would never see again. But at least all of them received opportunities to change their circumstances even if they were unwilling.
As for those doing it by choice. I know a few people who have done it for a while, mostly while traveling, and I think that plenty of famous people have done it. Why the even made a movie about one recently. It’s a free country.
I have a good friend who is a professional couch surfer. It’s not quite the same as being homeless. Poverty isn’t just about not having money, it’s about not having any real support structure. I’ve been close to that point, but never crossed the threshold. There are safety nets for people who want to get out of being homeless, and it’s not always about systemic issues like shelters. If someone really wanted to get out of homelessness they could go to churches and find people willing to help. 12 step programs for those who need them are great ways to develop a support structure. The important thing is building some semblance of community, because that’s what the homeless lack.
I agree with mswas about the importance of community and structure. It’s one of the reasons I strongly favor user-run self-help orgs for the homeless. It’s not just for the politics of advocacy & empowerment, it also creates a support network for people who’ve never had one.
Today’s Vancouver Sun has a front page story on this very subject, actually several stories. I am a subscriber, so I can read it, but I don’t know if anyone else can. It’s very interesting and somewhat heart-breaking. I am not sure if I’m breaking the rules by posting the link. If I am, please delete it.
The police and the mentally ill homeless
All the crazy people were cured during the Reagan years, you know, in both Canada and the US. Yup. “We don’t need to keep them locked up”, so they were magically cured by some means and turned loose.
There has to be a better way, but I admit I don’t know what it is.
I think you may be laboring under a mis-apprehension that laws requiring subjective judgment are not practical or enforceable. Because there are many, many laws in which the subjective judgment of a hypothetical “reasonable and prudent observer” is the standard by which sanction is, or is not, applied. I’ve already told you that noise ordinances (or traffic regulations for having a faulty muffler) are rarely enforced by reference to a decibel meter. Animal enforcement officers, to take another example, have to employ discretion in determining whether someone with eleven cats is a “cat fancier” (which is fine) or a “cat hoarder endangering animal welfare” (not okay), and I don’t know what scientific test you could devise for that. Ever hear of “driving in an unsafe manner?” Another subjective and enforceable standard, for various forms of risky driving that can’t be measured by a speed gun. Ever hear of “drunk and disorderly behavior?” I know what “drunk” means, I don’t have a scientific definition for what “disorderly” is, but police seem to do a pretty good job of applying this law mostly to guys fighting in bars, causing trouble on the sidewalk, disobeying lawful police orders, and not to mass numbers of boisterous Christmas party attendees who had one over the limit, or secretaries shrieking after their third Mudslide at the T.G.I. Fridays happy hour, or even old rummies peacefully shuffling home down the sidewalk after a day of downing booze at their local.
In short, your continued implication that there’s no workable standard for enforcing an anti-vagrancy law or anti-smelly-person law seems to be based on the simply-inaccurate assumption that in the absence of scientific criteria, laws dependent on a subjective “reasonable and prudent observer” can’t exist. Except they do.
I believe that a major factor in homelessness is the HUGE run-up of housing prices, since the late 1970’s. Take Boston-in 1979, you could buy a 3-family house for about $120,000, in a decent city neighborhood. With the rent from 2 units, you could live quite nicely on one salary. Now, that same house is >$600,000! For this reason , most American cities are unaffordable for people making small wages. I have heard it said that many people living in shelters work, but are unable to afford a place of their own.