Thursday, December 01, 2022

Locking Up the Poor

Today’s top stories are reactions to New York City’s plan to round up its homeless population. “NYC Mayor Adams faces backlash for move to involuntarily hospitalize homeless people,” reports NPR.

An additional perspective comes from Alec Karakatsanis here on Substack:

Eric Adams, the New York Times, and the Definition of Insanity.” He points out that cops will now be able to detain people who will then receive “unwanted and forcible medication in a locked setting for an indeterminate time. Police will do all of this even if the person ‘posed no threat to others’.”

The report critiques the way the city’s leading newspaper is covering the matter: “(A) lengthy New York Times article on homelessness and mental illness is astonishing for what is missing: the article does not contain a single mention of the root causes of homelessness. It does not mention affordable housing, poverty, inequality, real estate developers, or government policies that created or that could fix homelessness. It contains not a single mention of extraordinarily effective interventions like cash transfer programs targeting people at risk of homelessness. 

“Nor does the article contain a single mention of universal access to preventative health care, of the massive divestment in our society from mental health care, or of the root causes of mental illness.  A person reading this article would leave the article entirely uninformed about either the causes of the problems or the range of effective, simple interventions that politicians who actually care about solving them could employ.”

I recommend that anyone concerned about homelessness, drug addiction, mental illness and criminal justice carefully read this analysis.

And it is also worth noting that Eric Adams is a Democrat. Elected officials from both parties will pander to the public’s fear of crime, whether justified or not, whenever it helps to consolidate their hold on power.

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