Mentally ill folks, on the streets, used to be rounded up, institutionalized, got treatment, got hot meals, got a roof over their head, were safe, etc.
It is cruel to both the public and mentally ill to let them roam around cities terrorizing people and destroying themselves.
especially when they DO commit crime after crime after crime after crime. I don’t say that to inspire hate against the mentally ill; they typically are not fully responsible for their actions in any moral sense.
I remember eating at a large McDonald’s in a very upscale neighborhood. This guy came in, fell to the ground, started spasming wildly, pissed on the floor and himself, and screamed. No-one did ANYTHING to help him. So I called the police. The officer told me, “yeah, he does this EVERY NIGHT. No point arresting him; they won’t even hold him overnight.” That’s why no-one had done anything; they were used to it.
I get the civil-rights angle of not taking away the mentally ill’s freedom by putting them in a mental hospital against their will. I wouldn’t want the U.S. to become like Stalin’s Soviet Union with their barbaric “psychiatric hospitals” which were really literally torturous re-education prisons.
But if the mentally ill are actually committing crime after crime, I do believe that instead of ignoring those crimes, those crimes should be used to legally compel the insane to receive treatment.
“You pissed on the floor. That means 30 days’ jail. You’re sentenced to 30 days in blahblahblah hospital.”
gety them the help they need by taking away all the government handouts they get and take them off the streets into mental hospitals like the old days.