Comments on the problems of the homeless

For many of them, the root problem isn't their lack of a home, it is their lack of mental stability.  If they were given a home, they wouldn't know how to use it or keep it.  What many actually need is to be kept by a competent institution so they aren't a danger to themselves or to others.

Jeff Jarvis and Glenn Reynolds have extended posts, with links, on the problems that have derived from the deinstitutionalization movement -- a process that has put many at risk on both sides of the spectrum.  According to Jarvis,

the real issue isn't homelessness. It's insanity. The laws in this country make it impossible to commit and help even the obviously and often the dangerously insane.

I say that One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is as much at fault as any politician, for it made the institution frightening and the people who run it bad guys.

Reynolds provides vivid evidence of the risks associated with deinstitutionalizing dangerous people:

My wife thinks that the de-institutionalization movement was a dreadful mistake, and that a lot of people have suffered as a result. And they're not just the people who were deinstitutionalized, either, though they suffer the most. Her documentary on the Lillelid murders notes that the ringleader of the killers was discharged from a mental hospital after 11 days -- actually a fairly long stay by today's standards -- despite a clear recognition that she was dangerous to herself and others; if she'd had proper treatment, the family that she and her confederates murdered would still be alive.

The murderer is getting treatment now -- in prison -- and is doing much better mentally, but the price of admission to that treatment is typically a felony committed against the public.