To glimpse the future of homelessness policy in the age of President Trump, consider 16 acres of scrubby pasture on the outskirts of Salt Lake City where the state plans to place as many as 1,300 homeless people in what supporters call a services campus and critics deem a detention camp.
State planners say the site, announced last month after a secretive search, will treat addiction and mental illness and provide a humane alternative to the streets, where afflictions often go untreated and people die at alarming rates.
They also vow stern measures to move homeless people to the remote site and force many of them to undergo treatment, reflecting a nationwide push by some conservatives for a new approach to homelessness, one embraced and promoted by Mr. Trump.
With outdoor sleeping banned, removal to the edge of town may become the only way some homeless Utahns can avoid jail. Planners say the facility will also hold hundreds of mentally ill homeless people under court-ordered civil commitment and the effort will include an “accountability center” for those with addictions.
“An accountability center is involuntary, OK — you’re not coming in and out,” Randy Shumway, chairman of the state Homeless Services Board, said in an interview. Utah will end a harmful “culture of permissiveness,” he said, and guide homeless people “towards human thriving.”
It’s going to have to be run like a prison and a hospital or it will be a monster clusterfuck. Imagine 1,300 people, mostly men, many experiencing withdrawal, fighting to get out, eat up with serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia, jesus fuck me.
And the homeless aren’t typically the most sociable sorts. Lemmy acts like they’re just some dudes down on their luck. Some are, and probably by a higher percentage ATM than ever before in American history. But if you can’t finagle some sort of roof over your head in a Utah winter, it’s a fair bet you wear underwear outside the pants.
Only violence I’ve encountered on American streets was from the homeless. And I’ve worked the streets of South Chicago, ran with meth heads, drug dealers, lived in the worst parts of Tulsa, got into seriously hinky shit in my 20s. No violence. The homeless offered me an ass whuppin’ 4 times in downtown Pensacola, twice in just 3 nights in the French Quarter, as in, men chasing us down the street.
The legal issues are going to cost the state 100s of millions to fight out. Incarceration without clear evidence of a crime? Involuntarily medicated? Misdiagnoses (big deal in these sorts of places)? How many will die from alcohol withdrawal alone?! The ACLU and like organizations will have a fucking field day. They’ll win some, lose some, laws and regulations constantly shifting in a vortex of fucked up. Imagine working in a place where the rules vary daily, according to your job, and there are serious legal repercussions to fucking up. Who’s going to do that for what pay?
To put this in perspective, the largest single hospital in my area has 566 beds. To pull this off, they basically need a prison that’s double that size, plus the medical professionals, plus the corrections staff of a large county jail. (Ours maxes at 810 inmates.)
Also, add in IT, payroll, accounting, indoor and outdoor maintenance (tougher in a prison/hospital), admin staff, the list goes on and on.
“We have all the problems of a major theme park and a major zoo and the computers aren’t even on their feet yet.”
Some wit will say, “Just provide decent housing!” Yes, that works for many, we have the evidence. But anyone thinking that’s a magic bullet for this issue hasn’t been around the sort of people I’ve been around, up close and personal, in their homes and trailers, petting their dogs, listening to their rants, not judging them from driving by. And those are people who have managed to keep a roof of some sort! Put those mentally ill, addicted, anti-social misfits, all together?! Where?!
Typical America. We have a monster problem that needs attacked, nearly on a case-by-case basis, “Let’s build something BIG! Everything goes in the square hole!”
To be fair, some good can come of this. Some might dry out permanently, some might get on the drugs their mental health requires, some will get medical care better than letting their feet rot off from diabetes and frostbite. I often trust the professionals, in government and private enterprise. After all they know a shitload more than laymen can discern from a headline and a brief story. But when it comes to dealing with the worst off people in America, that’s where I don’t trust them, or us.
Reality will be that the medical and social service staff will be a fraction of what is needed, with the dregs of humanity serving as guards. Guard-on-Inmate and Inmate-on-Inmate violence and a humanitarian disaster will be the only thing that’s guaranteed here. This is a concentration camp, and it will be the same as what the Nazis did, minus the ovens if we’re lucky.
You know, I have had precisely the opposite experience.
True, but I think it’s the necessary start as both a show of good faith from a world that has thrown people away, and a stable foundation on which to built and therapize.