Rambling aside, I think it’s unfair to give people shit because they’re homeless. The real issue is we don’t commit people to psychiatric care when they’re clearly a problem in our society.

I’m old enough to remember when we did that. The homeless population absolutely skyrocketed, after all the mental institutions were closed in the 1980s and 1990s.

That said, many of them were hellholes. It’s sort of arguable as to whether the patients were worse off, but one thing’s for sure; the majority of city-dwellers (the ones with homes) are not better off, now. I’m really not sure who benefited from this.

Here, on Long Island (NY), we have some of the largest psychiatric centers in the world; almost all completely shut down, and decomposing.

The campuses are gorgeous, but can’t be developed, because they would require hundreds of millions of dollars in cleanup.

Where do you draw that line though? Are you really okay with committing people, i.e. imprisoning and medicating people, because society seems to find those people inconvenient?

Personally I've never understood any justification for committing a person without their consent. The line between being committed and being extra judicially imprisoned seems indistinguishable to me.

Well, that's what prison is, for some value of "inconvenient".

The problem is that at some point, if someone refuses to abide by laws/social norms, and can't be coerced via fines, etc., then the only options the state, and society has are either imprisonment, or allowing those people to ignore laws/social norms. Clearly some social norms (e.g. serious crimes) we aren't okay with ignoring, so it's really just a question of what the threshold is where we do something vs. allowing people to disregard said laws/norms.

> Personally I've never understood any justification for committing a person without their consent. The line between being committed and being extra judicially imprisoned seems indistinguishable to me.

Presumably the process to commit someone can involve the judiciary, so it wouldn't be extra-judicial.

Prison is for those convicted of a crime by a jury of their peers. There must not only be a criminal law on the books, you must be found guilt by trial.

Involuntary committal involves no laws being broken and there is no jury. I don't know every detail of that process though I am familiar with the general flow, I know multiple people that work in related roles, and my understanding from them is that it is generally not down through a legal proceeding.

I'm talking at a higher level - I'm saying that conceptually, "inconvenience" ranges from mild offences to murder, and society has to decide where to draw some line for inconveniences that it will not permit. If someone is determined to re-offend, regardless of severity, the state's only choices are to either let them re-offend, or to use force to prevent it.

What scares me about deinstitutionalization is that there are ways that people can ‘exit’ as in: move to the suburbs, drive instead of take public transportation, order a private taxi for your burrito instead of go to a restaurant. If public spaces can’t protect themselves we’ll have nothing but private spaces.

Puts a different spin on the System of a Down lyrics, "The percentage of Americans in the prison system (prison system) has doubled since 1985" (Prison Song, Toxicity, 2001).

This further reinforces the other complaints (in the song) about drug offences landing people in jail, some of them from self-medicating a mental illness they can't or won't get treatment for