Some people just do not give a single, solitary fuck about how their behaviour affects others.
I don't think jail is the answer, some mental health support might be.
I don't think jail is the answer, some mental health support might be.
So the idea that Typhoid Mary knew exactly what she was doing and did it anyways, makes for a great movie villain, but not necessarily real life. For more details:
"It is difficult to get a man [sic] to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" --Upton Sinclair
(There's really no need to nitpick my choice of words here. Your observations are quite valid and strengthen the point I was making. "Inconvenient" does not imply "trivial".)
Why is this in any way acceptable?
Those rich people could have paid her to quarantine, but they preferred to be rich rather than alive.
Mary preferred being alive over starving.
Who was doing dumb stuff? Not Mary.
There’s a huge chasm between “self isolate with government support so you don’t become homeless while being treated” and “you are no longer permitted to do any of the jobs you are allowed or able to do, you must isolate from everyone, I hope you’re independently wealthy”
Not getting her treatable fatal disease cured also implies she is incapable of not endangering herself either, but that's less troubling than what she does to others.
And why should anyone care about how this might offend them, if they cared so little about anyone else either?
Surely, surely, it’s just this one person failing society. We do not say “it is us failing each other” but this person failing us; the temerity of them!
There's rock-and-a-hard place economic scenarios I'd feel a lot of compassion for. Is it one of those, or is she just woefully capricious/willfully defiant? The coverage makes it hard for me to draw conclusions.
Also, as noted in the article: she went to the ER complaining of chest pain, knew she was TB positive, and did not tell anyone.
She was a passenger in a car while sick with both TB and COVID.
She's not disobeying because she doesn't have a support system. She's disobeying because she's a selfish asshole.
Why after a year of her clearly being a plague rat the court is only just getting to threatening her with electronic monitoring or confinement is beyond me. She should have been given a court order, and then upon failing to follow it, involuntarily confined until she submitted to treatment.
I am completely exhausted by our government's nearly endless toleration of people spreading highly contagious diseases.
Due to lack of information about the individual I wonder if language is a barrier. If their reasoning behind not seeking treatment is due to historical systemic racism within the medical community. Perhaps is a financial decision like others have stated.
From the documents we can see she is ordered to confine to "her residence" but according to the documents that location changed many times. Which leads me to believe this person may be without a home. The government can deem a shelter as her residence. Should she quarantine there or with family members or friends?
I believe there is a lot of nuance to these situations which may be why the state government has treaded lightly.
That might be satisfying to say, but it doesn't really solve anything on a systemic level. I think it's worth exploring how people become selfish assholes. I strongly suspect that a lack of trust in society, stemming from being repeatedly fucked over, is a primary cause. You can't expect people to show loyalty to a society that makes no secret of the fact it doesn't care about them.
I'm not implying anything in particular about this case. I'm just encouraging you, in the most general terms, not to let your thoughts terminate there, and to keep pulling on that "root cause" string.
Source: public health TB physician for 15+ years
Are there protections against them losing their job?
As we've seen with COVID that system no longer works. I can only guess why long-standing laws to protect the community are no longer applied.
Even as recently as 50 years ago she would have felt the full force of the law—the moment she failed to comply she would have been put in enforced quarantine.
If anyone can tell me why the law no longer work/is enforced then I'd love to know.
I have several elderly relatives (including my 70+ year old parents) and if a person infected them with TB or Covid through gross negligence I would not wonder how we can help that person. I don't know if I am a bad person or what, but I struggle not to fall into tribalistic patterns mentally and view dangerous outsiders as people who should be shunned instead of people who need help. I guess I was just curious if your first instinct is so generous.
This doesn't seem like an honest analogy. The legal/social concern here isn't about the individual, it's about their effect on others, and the extent to which it is willful negligence of something treatable. If someone has a known, treatable mental disorder and, repeatedly, refuses to follow the treatment and then engages in wilful behavior endangering others then yes that can absolutely be an issue. A better example would be epilepsy: in much of the world people with it cannot drive (or are restricted in license type/conditions, no Class C for example), because the accident rate for drivers with epilepsy is over double the baseline. They're not bad people obviously. And my understanding is that just in the last few years some very promising new medications have had studies showing significant improvements without side effects. So perhaps under those treatments it'd be fine for them to drive.
But if someone with epilepsy knew they did, refused treatment, lied about it, got a commercial license and then started side swiping people with a semi, then yes they'd be "shunned" (dealt with). It's the "dangerous" qualifier in OP's post that is the big issue.
If someone refuses treatment for a fatal illness, isn't that a clear sign of mental illness to you? To me, that's barely different from "God talked to me through my dog's poop and commanded me to poison my neighbor". Yes, clearly you don't want neither the TB-spreader nor the Poisoner running around doing their thing. But is jail the approach you'd go for?
I'd call those cases more crazy than criminal. A psych hospital would be a much better approach imho. Granted, they can look a lot like jails, but maybe that's something that could be changed instead of just using jail as a one-size-fits-all thing.
I would probably guess that anyone not thinking about the consequences of their actions on other people are also not thinking about the consequences of their actions on themselves, so jail seems like a pointless threat overall.
Not all criminals are deterred by threat of prison, and not all prisoners can be rehabilitated. For those people, jail is simply a mechanism to remove a known threat to society.
In this TB case, jail isn't a threat, it's a consequence that will improve the safety of innocent citizens.
Note that if you were inoculated with BCG, you'll show false positive for TB [1]. I had to go on six months of Zithromax as a kid because of this, despite everything from X-rays to blood tests coming back negative.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/tb/topic/testing/testingbcgvaccinated.ht...
Blood test proved negative.
Now they just go straight to blood test for BCG countries.
Most think jail is about protecting others, not a punishment, isn't this a case where it would actually be used for its intended purpose?