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Comment by xenospn | Hacker News Reader

I rarely, if ever agree with anything this administration says or does, but I don’t see how letting people rot on the street is the preferable alternative to keeping them somewhere where they at least can get some form of help or have access to a bathroom.

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I'm not confident that the alternative will be more humane (yes, I would in fact prefer to rot on the street than be in some of our institutions, even ones that aren't prison. Source: Masters in psychology and did my internship at a low-mid level nursing home)

But I do agree that the current situation is not good, and that reflexively defending the current system is stupid.

Confining people so that they cannot leave is our primary form of punishment. We're so horrified by it that we wrote it into the Constitution that you can't be deprived of your liberty except by due process of law.

Even if the conditions are pleasant. (Prisons aren't supposed to be cruel, though apparently we've decided to tolerate that.)

It does sound compassionate to force them into a place with a bathroom and a door, but if they can't go see their families, look for a job, or go for a walk, maybe it isn't as compassionate as it appears at first glance.

(And that is on the assumption that the facilities are less unpleasant than our prisons. I strongly doubt that.)

> but I don’t see how letting people rot on the street is the preferable alternative to keeping them somewhere where they at least can get some form of help or have access to a bathroom.

What you envision would require that we now have an excess of mental health capacity. There isn't. Now repeat that for thousands of municipalities.

There is an extreme shortage of available long term care.

There is never a shortage of space in prisons, not even when there is. It is where we have always put our MI - because anything else is inconvenient.

All of these things were known when this EO was drafted.

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