Mental Health is not Criminal
A renewed interest in strengthening
camping laws by municipalities around the US is a thinly disguised
criminal assault on homelessness.
To be fair, some cursory progress has
been made to deal with a growing homelessness and the subsequent
displacement of a segment of the US population. Unfortunately, it's
largely palliative. The measures undertaken haven' gone after the
root cause or any systemic-institutionalize problems.
However, rather than focus on a widely
debated and contentious argument of wealth inequality, we could turn
to different metrics. This is not to say that the idea of a widening
wealth gap is bankrupt. Compelling statistics point to a 1% or less
subset population controlling nearly 50% of new and established
wealth in the US. This certainly is a facet of homelessness but not
the main tenet of this article.
An often overlooked or undefined aspect
of homelessness is the misdiagnosis of a public health crisis. Worse,
it is a blatant gesture to crony capitalism which lurches a policy of
disinvestment in public utilities in favor of privatization.
A public utility which has been on a
slow march towards privatization is the prison system. Huge
multinational corporations have been lobbying all levels of
government to build and maintain private prisons in the US for
decades. And they have succeeded.
What is particularly disturbing about
this trend is that it has seemingly gone hand in hand with another
disinvestment of public utilities: mental health facilities. Most
states have fledgling mental health facilities or none at all. No
corporations have stepped in to fill this gap.
In order to fill more beds (cells),
homelessness, much like vagrancy, has been vilified and earmarked as
criminal. Instead of meeting some much need mental and public health
problems head on, governments have decided to treat abject poverty
and homelessness and mental health as criminal.
The politicians and we citizens as
their bosses (we voted them in office), apparently have opted to pay
for the costs on the back end instead of prevention. Rest assured,
there is a toll and pay we must.
