Do more people come to these cities that have such policies? Probably... but that's not an indictment of the policy. We have a national crisis. We have some cities/states who literally pay for 1-way bus tickets out (as an alternative to jail).
This solves nothing. Having more people in jail solves nothing.
Yes it does. It gets them off the streets. It is the only thing that will do it.
The problem in the past is that we only incarcerated homeless people overnight. Jail was a revolving door, and people went right back onto the streets after being released, over and over again.
The problem is that we released them before they had recovered from the problems that made them homeless! We put them right back on the streets! It was a stupid policy that achieved nothing.
We need to be willing, as a society, to incarcerate people, and keep them incarcerated, until we have a good reason to believe they will not be homeless when released. This will require massive commitment and expenditure.
The problem has become so great that nothing else will work. There are no other possible solutions. Plus, if you see the way these people currently live, you'd realize that being institutionalized is better than the hell that is currently their daily lives.
So does it follow that the reason the previous houseed persons who are now homeless were previously in jail? If not, then there are other root causes at work, such as disappearance of inexpensive housing.
The argument you are making sounds like a dialog out of Charles Dickens, just without the irony.
Really? What about the "people are shitting on the street" issue? You don't think arresting people who do that will stop it? It'll create other problems, and obviously we shouldn't just go around and permanently lock up everyone who is living on the street, but doing that would obviously solve some things.
There's a point at which freedom and independence aren't working for someone. Maybe with more resources it could work. But sometimes you need to be in the care of an institution from which you cannot just wander away. This seems obvious... I genuinely do not understand. Do you think there is no such threshold? Or do you think the people hanging out in Civic Center right now aren't over it?
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