Time to bring back asylums?

You may think these things are way in the past, but to many who aren't even that grey haired it was only yesterday.

I'm not necessarily arguing for or against asylums, but just arguing what seems to be something fixed in society can easily be overly assumed as the standard. It wasn't long ago that abortions were federally protected, now it's much less so. I wouldn't assume that things always march forwards, especially in the current climate. Then again, it all depends on your point of view which way "forwards" is.

So sure, you and I here, we can agree we shouldn't just say "you're gay, therefore need to be institutionalized." But honestly, there's a lot of people still out there that think differently. And in some ways, they're gaining influence and power.

If you are going to fund an asylum system well enough to be effective, you could fund our current system. If you are not going to fund it, you are literally reproducing the cycle that resulted in underfunded, abusive and hidden asylums of the 19th and 20th centuries.

We (as in Western Civilization living in post-Enlightenment liberalism) can't purport to respect human dignity and self-determination and also criminalize homelessness. And that's what jail is, criminalization. There is no "non-criminal" jail. In the United States, you can't be criminalized without due process, because fundamentally, a basic western human right is the right to personal dignity and autonomy.

Criminal recidivism is a problem. Some homeless or mentally ill people will be recidivist criminals. They should be punished for their crime after being afforded due process and any defenses thereto (e.g. lack of mental capacity). There are ways to handle criminal recidivism (in CA, famously, there's the "three-strikes" rule against multi-time felons). Apart from hardcore criminal-justice reformers, nobody disagrees with the idea of punishing crime according to the nature of the crime and increasing punishment for recidivism.

Being homeless is not a crime. Nor is it a crime to have mental illness. There are ample failures (drug war, lack of safety net, unwillingness to regulate predatory housing/investment, lack of accessible mental healthcare, social stigma, etc.) that cause homelessness/mental illness. All of which are indictments against society at large. It is anathema to a free, liberal culture to cause the problem and then punish it criminally.

To say that society only intervenes when a crime is committed is reductionist and wrong. There are plenty of civil remedies that restrain conduct (e.g. an "injunction"). More broadly, the government restrains conduct all the time for non-criminal matters (taxation, zoning permits, most financial or environmental regulation, intellectual property laws). Different efforts to restrain activity have different methods of enforcement. Including involuntary civil commitment. But for the reasons mentioned above regarding due process and personal autonomy, only crime is enforced by jail time.

We cannot claim to be a free, law-abiding, liberal democracy rooted in Western ideals and at the same time carte blanche suggest that "jail" is a categorical solution to homelessness and mental illness, as the parent commenter suggested. The type of thinking that the parent commenter proposed is anti-democratic, anti-western, and candidly, fascist. There are plenty of places people can move to if they want to live in that type of society, but none of them claim to be Western in design.

"Between 2008 and 2019, the percentage of adolescents (ages 12 to 17) that reported having experienced at least one major depressive episode in the past year increased nearly 90 percent, from 8.3 percent in 2008 to 15.7 percent in 2019"

As m463 highlights, 'But later state mental illness funding was cut.'

Does the cut in funding correlate with the rise in problems?