Invest in Housing, Not Prisons: California's War on the Homeless
Invest in Housing, Not Prisons: California's War on the Homeless
Rather than treating housing as a human right and committing to large-scale construction of accessible housing, states like California are responding with police raids of homeless encampments and imprisonment for unhoused people.
Gotta keep those slave labor camps filled up!
No, absolutely fucking not.
I get this is lemmy.ml, but neither housing nor prisons have any benefit here.
We need serious, fundamental mental health services, most of the chronic homeless have crippling issues and many need medication.
We can have other programs to help people living out of their cars, housing makes sense there.
But we are the dumping ground for every trash red state that doesn't want to deal with their problems so they send them here, and the worst of those problems are psychiatric.
We've had results when we send out social workers and doctors to treat the problem on the ground, but that's never proven sustainable, we need funding for community centers to deal with this, coupled with a pathway to get them back into society without relapse.