Those people are given help, but if they refuse that, there's nothing you can really do. People are only forced if they start being dangerous to other people.
It is thus very difficult to understand why there are homeless people. But I once went (with work) on a trip with a homeless person (this is a charity, you pay and homeless people take you one trip and talk about their lives). And indeed the people on the streets always have psychological issues. Extreme ADHD, abused as a child, depression but just a little bit to afraid to die to really end it. If they want help it is there, always. Homeless shelters, places to get a postal address for free to apply for subsidies and minimal social income etc. But some just go crazy while waiting or go crazy while sleeping with other people in one room. Or they walk barefoot in the winter until their feet are so rotten that they can't walk anymore, too afraid to get help because they believe help means they will be abused again or mind altered or something strange. Most of them are constantly afraid and not a danger to others, more like very shy animals afraid of other humans, so they retreat and suffer while their fear of death keeps them alive, just barely.
One woman we spoke to had her child murder her other child and she just started drinking. How can you help such a woman? So much pain.
Also, I think the current method of making alcohol really expensive through levies is not working. It only makes homeless addicted people poorer and more likely to turn to crime.
The rest of us don't give a shit how much it costs, we don't use much of it anyway. The price is never a factor in getting addicted or getting off it.
All it is is the government profiteering of people who can't help themselves.
But no one likes the alternative, which is to say there is no more alcohol, because it's just another human being saying you can't have more of this that you crave.
I agree alcohol is a drug and should be treated as one.
Really this definition needs to be more strict. In San Francisco, you could be drugged up, throw needles and broken alcohol bottles on the street, openly defecate, and this behavior is still considered not dangerous.
A better way to deal with this is to allow people to reject welfare, but if they do, they still need to live as a decent member of the society. No littering, no public nuisance (shouting, spitting, harassing people), maintaining hygiene (no public urination/defecation, no risk of disease transmission etc.), no permanent encroachment of public property and so forth. Otherwise, it just ends up in a slippery slope that creates a sinkhole of billions of dollars in costs to the economy, at the expense of others.
And if they refuse to "live as a decent member of society"?
> Otherwise, it just ends up in a slippery slope that creates a sinkhole of billions of dollars in costs to the economy, at the expense of others.
So given that is it better to try and help them reintegrate with society or do we just lock them up and forget about them? Or worse?
- Tolerate the behaviour
- Remove their freedom
- Kill them
The line between tolerance and removing freedoms has to be drawn somewhere. This question of yours isn't helpful to the debate - the only way to push the conversation forward is to proactively say where you want the line drawn. All that this question will do is discover that the line is drawn arbitrarily and has uncomfortable edge cases. But that is a property of any legal boundary. Nobody has yet been able to draw a line that isn't arbitrary.
I make a point of talking to people across the political spectrum and I have heard all kinds of answers, from things which are basically "stick them in camps" (from both left and right-wing people!) to "ignore them" to various rehabilitation approaches.
My view is that we should step back, and consider what it is that we, the folks who are the so-called decent members of society, want.
The city I live in has a big decaying area next to the downtown core, like many cities of a million or more do these days. It waxes and wanes, right now in particular in the wake of Covid it's very bad. Crime, needles, sketchy people, it's horrible. The thing is, these are neighbourhoods that should be nice; they should be full of young families living a walkable distance from downtown, not crackheads and needles.
I get that, as decent human beings, we owe each other a fundamental level of dignity. I am fine with efforts to feed, clothe, and house those who cannot do it themselves. But why does this need to extend to giving them a huge swathe of land, land that is potentially much nicer than any place I will ever live in, for them to ruin?
But what can we do - lock them up? Restrict their fundamental freedoms? Can we _really_ just ignore them and accept sketchy, scary, crime-ridden cities?
Rehabilitation, reeducation and basic assistance should always be the first step (Welfare). But if you opt out and willingly chose to continue to damage the overall society, you should then also be willing to face the consequences. Just like criminal justice system, for minor offenses, you get off with warnings, but if you show up for the fifth time at a courthouse for a drunken disorderly conduct, you go to jail.
You, presumably, are not mentally ill, mentally disabled, or suffering from severe substance addiction. The majority of homeless people (besides Roma) in most European countries are some mix of these.
When you say "just fine/jail the homeless for bad behavior", what you are really saying is "mentally ill/disabled people should not be helped, they should be jailed". Do you still stand by that statement?
> The majority of homeless people (besides Roma) in most European countries are some mix of these.
The number is less than half for mental health patients and about half if you account for substance abuse. That number is lower in the US.
But regardless of the number, in your hurry to virtue signal someone over the internet, you completely missed the point. The argument was pretty simple, rehab and assistance is the first step, the rest was for people who actively refuse that.
For the mentally ill who refuse help, would you rather have them live a life of abuse and then die in misery on the streets or have them institutionalized? And for the drug abusers/alcoholics who refuse rehab, at what point does individual accountability start kicking in? Society is willing to help you, but if you still reject it, at some point you need to face the consequences.
I stand by my statement.
I'm not saying there shouldn't be any accountability for addicts, but the fact that we completely write them off as a society says more about us than it does about them.
But when people do become homeless in Finland, their problems usually run quite deep already, and they may just be quite difficult to help.
I don't know if this is true but I've understood that in the U.S. homelessness might more often be a result of just financial downfall, while in Finland homelessness is very strongly connected to mental illness, substance dependence, or both [1]. Those people have pretty much lost control of having a normal life, or perhaps they never had one. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be helped, but it does mean helping them is likely to be an uphill battle.
Drug addiction does get judged harshly by the society in general; alcohol abuse is likely to be swept under the rug unless it causes obvious problems e.g. at work, but if it does, it gets judged as well, although not quite as harshly as drug abuse. I'd expect most social workers and medical professionals who work with the homeless to know better than to see addiction as just a moral failure, though, so the problem may rather be that it's quite difficult to treat people who have a multitude of problems that run deep. Health care professionals might be wary of committing limited public resources in cases if they don't expect it to bear fruit, so the mental health services might be limited to emergency care and general assistance by social workers.
I'm not intimately familiar with how those services work, though, so they might be more extensive than I think.
[1] That is, at least among the native population; another visible group of homeless are poor immigrants living in the streets. They probably just wanted a better life in a richer country or something, and their reasons for vagrancy are probably different.
However, there is little community will to address those circumstance and a great deal of political pressure against aiding vulnerable adults.
To see strong examples political resistance, suggest moving folks in prison for low-level, mentally ill related crimes into in-patient facilities - redirecting per-person funding from prison budgets to pay for their care.
I assume this isn't really true, and that the standard in Finland is that they're institutionalized if they're a danger to other people or themselves. The latter part is tricky, though. A person who is clearly in danger of killing themselves with a razor blade can be committed. A person who is in danger of drinking themselves to death on the sidewalk, perhaps not.