And if they refuse to "live as a decent member of society"?
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 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?
> 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.
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.