(cont'd from yesterday's post)
Compassion motivated social reformer Dorothea Dix in the 1800's to campaign for big, safe, therapeutic mental asylums. Compassion motivated mid-1900's reformers to eliminate them. Compassion today urgently calls for a better system than rotating the mentally ill between the streets, jails, and hospital ER's.
Two Olympia police officers on their morning rounds find a shirtless man lying half-way into the street. They politely wake him. He manically throws metal into a cart, screaming about zombies and a mob coming to kill them. It is "Angry Marty," and they will find him again the next morning suffering through another drug-induced terror, and they will have to leave him to fend for himself - until he commits a crime, and then he can go to jail.
"Under the weight of a cultural revolution against the asylums and civil rights lawsuits against involuntary commitment, a prison sentence has become the easiest option. The mentally ill get subsumed into the criminal class."
from City Journal
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