Locking Up The Homeless

WaPo (“Trump order pushes forcible hospitalization of homeless people“):

President Donald Trump has directed federal agencies to find ways to make it easier to forcibly hospitalize homeless people with mental illness and addiction for longer periods — an effort to fight what the administration calls “vagrancy” threatening the streets of U.S. cities.

An executive order signed Thursday pushes federal agencies to overturn state and federal legal precedent that limits how local and state governments can involuntarily commit people who pose a risk to themselves or others.

The order said shifting homeless people into long-term institutional settings will restore public order. “Surrendering our cities and citizens to disorder and fear is neither compassionate to the homeless nor other citizens,” Trump’s order said.

The impact of Trump’s executive order remains unclear because states set laws and handle the process of involuntary commitments. Critics warned that such a policy threatens returning the nation to a darker era when people were often unjustly locked away in mental health institutions, and does nothing to help people afford housing.

“The safest communities are those with the most housing and resources, not those that make it a crime to be poor or sick,” Jesse Rabinowitz, communications director of the National Homelessness Law Center, said in a statement. He called forced treatment unethical and ineffective.

NPR (“Trump signs an executive order to make it easier to remove homeless people from streets“):

Fulfilling a campaign promise, President Trump has signed an executive order that seeks to overhaul the way the U.S. manages homelessness.

The order signed Thursday calls for changes to make it easier for states and cities to remove outdoor encampments and get people into mental health or addiction treatment. That includes involuntary civil commitment for those “who are a risk to themselves or others.”

[…]

The White House action also seeks to shift federal funding away from longtime policies that sought to get homeless people into housing first, and then offer treatment. Instead, it calls for prioritizing money for programs that require sobriety and treatment, and for cities that enforce homeless camping bans.

It also directs the departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and Urban Development, and Transportation to assess federal grant programs and prioritize places that actively crack down on illicit drug use, urban camping and loitering, and urban squatting “to the maximum extent permitted by law.”

Critics said the sweeping action does nothing to solve homelessness, and could make it worse.

“This executive order is forcing people to choose between compassionate data driven approaches like housing, or treating it like a crime to have a mental illness or be homeless,” said Jesse Rabinowitz with the National Homelessness Law Center.

“Institutionalizing people with mental illness, including those experiencing homelessness, is not a dignified, safe, or evidence-based way to serve people’s needs,” Ann Oliva with the National Alliance to End Homelessness said in a statement.

Trump’s order also calls on the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration to defund addiction programs that include “harm reduction.” This is certain to disrupt frontline health care programs that work to reduce overdoses from fentanyl and other street drugs.

Addiction experts consider harm reduction, including programs that provide clean needles and other paraphernalia, to be an essential part of helping people survive addiction. Trump’s order repeats the claim that such programs encourage drug use, an argument disproven by years of research, including by federal scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Thursday’s White House action builds on a landmark Supreme Court ruling last year that said cities can punish people for sleeping outside even if they have nowhere else to go. Since the high court ruling, well over 100 cities across more than two dozen states have passed or strengthened bans on homeless camping. More may now feel pressure to do so if that makes it easier to get federal funding.

That the current approach to homelessness has failed is self-evident. Even mayors of left-leaning cities are conducting sweeps to end encampments in parks, bolstered by a recent Supreme Court decision.

There are clearly a considerable number of the homeless population who need professional help. But this doesn’t seem to be the primary intent:

Shifting homeless individuals into long-term institutional settings for humane treatment through the appropriate use of civil commitment will restore public order.  Surrendering our cities and citizens to disorder and fear is neither compassionate to the homeless nor other citizens.  My Administration will take a new approach focused on protecting public safety.

Given that there has been no appropriation for any of this, one suspects that this amounts to warehousing—quite probably on a permanent basis—rather than treatment.

As with illegal immigration, there’s widespread agreement that something needs to be done. But actual policy solutions turn out to be either so wildly expensive as to be impractical or so cruel as to be unconscionable.