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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]DP.  I have worked with the homeless.  Virtually all of them carried a knife of some kind.

Furthermore, they (especially the women) have valid reasons to fear staying in shelters; come is commonplace in shelters. [/quote]

Then shelters need to be fixed, and if there are really criminally violent homeless folks making them "scary" , those folks need to be locked up and treated. No shelters for them.[/quote]

I agree. We need to invest more money to take better care of the neediest among us so they have a safe, decent place to shelter. We also need upstream services that can intervene earlier to prevent them from getting this low in the first place. By the time most people are eligible for public services, they are way beyond being able to help themselves. I work with an organization that tries to do this. They say that they realized they were spending a ton of money and risk trying to pull drowning people out the swiftly moving river, when someone asked, "Why don't we move upstream and prevent them from falling in?"

I also know that for those who have severe mental illnesses, mandatory confinement is seriously problematic given the history of how this country used to do that, and voluntary commitment is nearly impossible to achieve long term. Even if there are nice places with good support where a family wants a troubled adult to live, you can't force that adult to go there. We have yet to come up with a livable solution for 90% of the mentally ill.[/quote]

We CAN change the laws. Our legislators CAN do that. Families of the mentally ill are the ones most desperate for this. There is nothing scarier for them than watching their progressively mentally ill child turn 18 and become "unhelpable" (if they don't want to help themselves). it is seriously sad. I love the movie One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, but we can't let a 50 year old film drive today's policy. Let it drive us to do better. It's time to move the dial to humane involuntary commitment, and yes to upstream services to divert as many as possible before that point.[/quote]

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