July 12th, 2008
As some of you know, my apartment is right on the teetering edge of the downtown east side, which apparently is Canada’s poorest postal code. My block is actually the western border of the DTES on its southern tip: on my side of the block, you almost never see the down and outers. But on the other side of my block, which puts you on Main Street, it’s all about the DTES residents. There are single room occupancy hotels, slimy bars, a flourishing drug trade, everything. So I have had plenty of opportunities to see and think about homelesness and the cluster of problems that accompanies it. I can’t talk about a solution to the problem without explaining something of how I understand why the problem exists, so that’s what this post will mainly be about. What follows is highly summarized, but I hope to at least impart the flavour of this huge body of research.
First we need to decide how we define the homeless. I actually include not just people sleeping on the streets but the people living in abject poverty in the shitty, rodent and bug infested single room occupancy hotels in the DTES. They are barely a step above literal homelessness and seem to share a lot of the problems of the actual homeless: interpersonal, intrapersonal, substance abuse and dependence, and so on. And, the people with an SRO can easily slide into homelessness. There are probably some things that set the long term homeless folks apart, but I don’t know them, and they are all nearly equally filthy and miserable looking, so I think we can safely consider them as a group.
Developmental psychology and the psychology of trauma have a lot to teach us about why people born in the DTES are so very, very fucked right from birth. We can begin at the basic level of biology with the physical health of the mother and whether she uses substances including alcohol (which can be devastating to the fetus, at thresholds which are currently uncertain). I don’t know a lot about this side of things other than to say if your very physical self is compromised early because your fetal vessel was unhealthy, that’s bad. And ask yourself, what does it say for the mother’s ability to mother, considering that her poor health represents basic failures to perform self care skills and make realistic choices in furtherance of an superordinate goal (the developing fetus’s health)? This is a social issue also, as ill health and drug use are linked to poverty and exploitation in a mutually reinforcing cycle.
So our first real problem is that we begin with damaged adults. This is where damaged children come from. Contrary to what the post-Freudian apologists would have us believe, parenting actually has a great deal to do with how kids turn out. It’s not everything, but it’s huge, massive, enormously important. (This is one reason I am scared to be a parent - there’s a lot to fuck up!) Indigent people don’t come from nowhere. In Canada, where we are not torn by civil war or invasion, we have to look to psychology and sociology to tell us where we get these people. I know next to nothing about sociology so I will restrict myself mainly to psychology.
(Please note that we here at BV are not in the business of blaming victims. For every bad parent in the DTES there is surely a tragic and devastating story of trauma and loss to explain it. But that doesn’t change the reality of the situation, which is, in this example, bad mothering. The baby doesn’t care if mother is inadequate out of malice or inability. Good intentions do not raise up healthy children, good acts do.)
We move next to infant care and attachment - and attachment in this case doesn’t mean the fuzzy, bonding experience, but rather the evolutionarily crucial set of behaviours whereby the infant can rely on a sensitive and appropriate response from the primary caregiver when he experiences pain, sickness, or fear. If the primary caregiver, usually the mother, is unable to selflessly and sensitively respond to her infant’s distressing needs (for alleviance of distress due to hunger and other bodily needs, comfort when ill or in pain, and reassurance when afraid), he may develop an insecure or disorganized attachment by the time he is one year old. Disorganized attachment in particular predicts very poor social and emotional/interpersonal outcomes, a finding which is stable across the lifespan. Poor attachment style has a very high rate of intergenerational transmission; disorganized babies become disorganizing parents who have disorganized infants of their own. (Disorganized refers to the behaviours the infant manifests when his attachment system is activated by fear or pain - he wants to approach the mother because she is his source of comfort, but she is also a source of fear and pain, so he does not know what do to. He has no systematic, organized method of approach to her, and because of the conflicting emotions toward her will behave very strangely at the time of activation.)
Learning theory is instructive here too. Children learn through a variety of methods: One example is operant conditioning, where rewards and punishment are used to shape behaviour. Returning to our damaged parent, what sorts of lessons will she impart to her child through reward? It may be that her own needs are so pressing that she cannot set them aside and, without conscious intention, she teaches her child that he will be rewarded when he takes care of Mommy’s needs rather than his own. She may punish him for developmentally appropriate behaviours because she herself didn’t have good parenting and doesn’t know what it looks like, what healthy childhood looks like. Mother passes on lessons she has learned because she literally has nothing else to give. And now these lessons belong to the child.
Children also imitate people who are important to them. This is a very deep, unconscious internalization. When they imitate they aren’t acting, they’re taking in, assimilating, and then replicating what they learn. Children also internalize important people’s roles as a sort of template which informs later interactions with people in that role. They will grow up and respond to people in those roles as if they fit the internal template (whether they do or not). If as a child I learn that fathers are violent and capricious and untrustworthy, I may react with inapprorpriate terror and suspicion to male authority figures in adulthood. When children grow up in a household with severely damaged adults (such as the kind that populate the DTES), what they internalize can be dire indeed.
Psychodynamically, we can talk about ego defenses that are adaptive during childhood becoming entrenched and part of the personality, but then it turns out they aren’t so adaptive during adulthood. Dissociating during childhood sexual abuse is a survival skill - dissociating during a stressful job interview is not. But how do you jettison the defense, which by its very nature is unconscious so you don’t know you’re using it?
Recall our internal template of the violent father: it may be that though the adult experiences authority figures as terrifying, he cannot tolerate that powerful and frightening emotion and so defends against it, maybe by devaluing. So the terror is hidden (but still present) and all we see is someone who reacts to authority figures (like employers, doctors, and social workers) with great disdain and arrogance. He looks like a major jackass who, in defiance of all logic, defeats himself seemingly out of pure spite. But the truth is that really, deep inside, what you’re dealing with is a terrified child. Think of a time in your life, if you have one, when you experienced true terror. Could you have logicked your way into behaving differently than you did at that time? Why would expect differently from our hypothetical adult?
What we’re talking about is the entire field of psychology: nature and genesis of personality, self capacities of all sorts, and I guess the point I’m trying to make is this: I have a sense of what sorts of backgrounds lead to homelessness, which is nothing if not a significant failure to get along in this modern world. If you are long term homeless, you probably don’t have skills the rest of us do, such as getting along interpersonally in an adaptive manner. This failure alerts us to the existence of significant trauma in the person’s background, probably going back to infancy. Like good parenting, healthy interactions don’t spring from the void; much of how we interact and conceive of others comes from our earliest years. And we have to overlay society-level problems like the incredible difficulty individuals face when trying to escape poverty and its attendant evils. Combine social oppression with deep psychological damage and you get the downtown east side.
As for how to solve the problem, I have no good ideas. It’s such a huge problem. It requires massive social change but that is merely necessary, not sufficient. We still have a legion of people carrying elephants of intrapsychic damage and that won’t just go away when they get a safe apartment, healthy food, a job, and access to services.
Also, consider that the more “normal” segments of our society regularly produce individuals who cannot cope successfully and move to the DTES, or places like it, and fall into that lifestyle (which can include homelessness). There don’t seem to be a lot of kids down there, but the supply of adults doesn’t run out. This tells us that the problem doesn’t spring just from the DTES itself - even if we rounded up all the people there and dropped them into the ocean, more would take their place. The trick ending of this entry is that the damaged and damaging parents in question might be your next door neighbour. Their damage might have such a form that they are able to get along to a degree in so-called “normal” life - maybe they have a job, a spouse, a mortgage. But the damage sits in other places psychically and will likely be passed in some form to their child. Perhaps the child won’t have quite the same suite of coping mechanisms they do, and he or she will end up sliding through substance dependence into homelessness.
And how do we fix that?
Vex,
What about some sort of mass institutionalization scheme? Sort of a forced rehab for the habitually homeless, drug addicts and the like? We could take away their children, and take preventative measures to stop conception amongst the less capable. We might be able to break the cycle of parent to child if we removed them from the stiuation early enough. Those that were rehabilitated could rejoin the community, and the rest could be warehoused until they died, and then due to the lack of procreation, and the taking of their children, in a few generations, there would be hardly any ne’er-do-wells left.
Now, of course it would be expensive, in the short term, but property crime would be so reduced, it might help to offset the costs, and if we ran it bare bones, like a prison island, we might be able to keep costs down as well. The more able ones could be used as a workforce as well.
As for the human rights argument… honestly, would they be any worse off than they are now, dying on the streets of the modern plague?
Think the Gulag system.
Thoughts?
~ I.
Great blog, subscribed to your rss feed. Thanks.
As someone else said, you have managed to combine residential schools and concentration camps in one response. I don’t imagine good outcomes from this plan.
Don’t forget that other fan-favourite - Eugenics!
All of these measures were tried on various groups of “ne’er-do-wells” at one time or another. They were massive human rights violations and they didn’t work.
There are several problems inherent in your plan, Innominate.
1) Who is to judge what qualifies as unsuitable for society or unsuitable to breed? Where will the line be drawn?
2) Do you really think that the homeless are responsible for all the world’s ills (or even just the ills of the middle class)? Would eliminating street people really drive crime down? I sincerely doubt it.
3) You haven’t really addressed what I believe is the major problem that drives homelessness - mental illness. If your “rehabilitation” scheme were softened to government funded help for adults with chronic mental illness (and subsequent addictions), you might actually see some change for the positive.
As a very dear, mentally ill friend of mine once said, “I am only my father away from the street. If he weren’t supporting me, I’d have nowhere else to go.”
1) Same sort of procedures as today, just more strict, and streamlined. I mean, we have ministries that can take kids from their parents, we just change the point at which we intervene.
And the justice system, get picked up 3 times for posession, you go to “crackhead island” or whatever. If you get rehab’d and release, you’re on probation with random drug tests for say a year or so.
I mean, societies set “lines” and laws all the time. .08 is intoxicated, .02 isn’t. so maybe with posession, 3 times is the charm.
2. All the worlds ills, no. A large percentage of property crime? Yes. I urge you to speak to any urban police officer, and he or she will most likely tell you that property crime is largely comitted in support of drug habits, by “ne’er-do-wells”
I absolutely believe that if 50% of drug addicts died tomorrow, property crime would drop drastically.
3. Hey, I’m all about supporting crazy people. I think booting them out in the community instead of keeping them in Riverview was a monumental mistake, and disservice to them. By all means, if you are too crazy to take care of yourself, you should be locked up for your own good. If you hear voices and can’t be trusted to take your meds, you should be locked up and forced to take them.
If we rounded them all up, and medicated them in institutions, you wouldn’t have them same sort of amature, unsupervised self medication with heroin and the like that leads to overdoses, and needle sharing, and the spread of disease. And if you think institutions are expensive, try dealing with the losses from property crime, healthcare cost from AIDS and the like, and all the other money we sink into band-aid solutions for containing and treating addicts and the homeless.
And as an addendum, let me say that I think we do society a disservice when we euphemize the problems people have. “Social Assistance” basically means you can’t hack it in life. Maybe you’re crippled, or retarded, or just lazy or stupid. Which while unfortunate, is sorta the way life turns out for some people. Yet the prevailing idea seems to be to treat them as “normal people” with a particular issue, so as not to dehumanize them. They aren’t “cripples” they are “persons, with mobility issues” they aren’t “crazy” they are “mentally ill” or “persons with emotional or psychological challenges”.
Well nuts to that. I think we do have a duty to people that got the short end of the stick in life. and ya, even to those that just screwed themselves with bad choices. But the whole concept that I have to perform a duty for them, means they can’t make it without me.
So don’t try to throw good money after bad and let them live however they want in shitty hovels downtown to breed, and spread disease and cost more healthcare dollars.
Take away their choices, because they keep fucking them up.
I mean seriously, that’s why parents don’t send their 8 year old grocery shopping with 200 dollars; he’d come back with a videogame and 150 dollars worth of candy.
People that can’t hack it without us, should be treated similarly to children. I mean, if you can’t get the concept of “I shouldn’t be shooting heroin”, sorry man, you can’t take care of yourself. I’ll pay society to take care of you, but you live by some rules, just like kids.
Paternalism is the answer.
~ I
So we need to protect the fuck ups from themselves and of course protect us normals from them. What you’re talking about sounds nothing like Riverview though - you’re talking about a forced labour camp, a bare bones prison island - clearly your aim is not “rehabilitation” or even “treatment” but in fact “punishment.” Consider the residential school - a generation utterly fucked up by well meaning attempts to “fix” Native kids. They did so much damage it’s almost hard to imagine. You give lip service to treatment but your plan will not fix/rehabilitate anyone. And history has shown us time and time again that prison does NOT act as a deterrent. The problem isn’t that they think they won’t get caught (though they may) - the problem is something deeper, a need or needs.
I think it’s wildly inappropriate to punish someone who is a drug addict by twenty years of forced labour on a bare bones prison island. The reason I think this is related to the post - I can only too well see the reasons for the bad behaviour. Many, many, many are not actually under the control or the fault of the particular addict in question. But then again, maybe this doesn’t matter to you, since your focus is punishment (whereas I would seek some sort of solution that eliminates sources of the problem).
Consider, as i say, that society’s fuck ups don’t just come from the DTES. Would you institute some kind of mass, population wide yearly assessment to determine whose kids get yanked? (Are you aware that taking kids from their parents, even abusive ones, causes enormous damage to those kids?) Who decides?
And for that matter, would you want to live in such a police state? All of your ideas have been tried before, witness Germany in the forties, Stalinist Russia, and communist China. How did that work out for them - and would you have wanted to live there?
I was referred to your blog from a friend.
I liked the empathy with which you addressed the trauma that many in the DTES are struggling with. Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
I see poverty as a symptom of inequality. People are not living with bedbugs and struggling with addictions because they want to be there. A series of choices they were given (usually choices of bad or worse) have led to a situation where their poverty is visible. There are just as many addicts who can afford to hide their addictions (alcoholism anyone??) and pay to have someone else take care of their kids - the reality is that these people pass as middle class and so we don’t judge them and we don’t take their kids. However, we somehow feel free to judge the parenting and behaviors of those in the DTES.
In terms of child apprehension…the drop out rates, rates of addiction, and criminalization of youth in care are absurdly high. My question is why the state only gives a single mother with 1 child $940 a month but they are willing to pay foster parents over $700 a month to care for the child (if you are given $940 a month for you and your child you face pretty sketchy housing choices). Way too many studies have shown that the child welfare system destroys children’s lives. Combine this with the fact that there are more Aboriginal children in care this year than the total number of children who were ever in residential schools.
Clearly the situation in the DTES is a result of a systemic erasure of people’s cultures, identities and family relationships. I challenge Incognito really think about the struggle to try and parent a child when the only parent you have know was an abusive institution. It isn’t easy - full disclosure time, my grandfather was in a residential school. I have watched two generations of my family struggle to relearn how to parent. The successes where largely based on community support, non-judgmental attitudes, and a re-engagement with our culture.
As for solutions,I have none but I do know that the solutions which usually work are based on the knowledge and experience contained in a community. The DTES will start looking better when we start listening to the voices that exist there and supporting the solutions that they come up with.
Firstly, the DTES will start looking better when they give the residents the “Bum’s rush” just prior to the Olympics.
Secondly, how is it clear that the “systematic erasure of cultures…” etc. is responsble for the situation? I don’t think we can sum up the causes so neatly.
Thirdly, I thought about the struggle to parent when you’ve had a bad institution screwing you up. I’m sure it’s a monumental struggle. Perhaps even beyond the abilities of most people.
Perhaps they shouldn’t try it.
Some people can juggle flaming knives while blindfolded. Most should not make the attempt. They won’t only screw their own lives up. Honestly, if a person is a “fuck up”, through their fault, or through unfortunate circumstances, one of the best things they can do is avoid procreation.
Vex touched on the massive disadvantage kids with mothers who abuse substances during pregnancy are forced to cope with. So, even if we did warehouse these people on some island, and sterilize the lot of them, at least we’d be prevented kids from being abused in utero. We’d also cut down on, although not eliminate the number of downtrodden in the next generation.
Rehabilitation schemes generally don’t work. A very small percentage of people get clean, sane, de-criminalized and move on to lead productive lives. Let’s do a little social triage, save the ones that aren’t a massive struggle, and warehouse the rest where they can do less harm to themselves than being allowed the freedom to continue to make poor choices that have generational consequences, and at the same time, keep decent people safer and happier.
You don’t have to bail out every drop of water in a leaking boat to keep it afloat, you just need to get a good bunch of it overboard.
It sucks we can’t save them all, but that’s reality, and everyone seems to recognize that all the tactics to save them aren’t working.
~I.
My suspicion is that warehousing just won’t work either. Even if we only single out problematic parenting, which if I understand you is Incognito’s focus, the thing is that problematic parenting is in all segments of society. Rich, professionally successful people can produce terribly damaged children. I guess the point I’m trying to make is there often are no outward signs that Person A is going to be a bad parent and therefore should not reproduce or be allowed to reproduce.
Also, as Winter Coat points out, apprehending children - even from terrible parents - is disastrous for them. That’s not a solution, or at least not a final one.
I find it highly disagreeable to contemplate incarceration of the mentally ill (and this is what addicts are, and also the homeless in overwhelming numbers). We don’t incarcerate cancer patients just because they’re going to become socially useless and cost us a bucket of money in health care. I do think there is a place for institutional care, if appropriately applied (ie, without abuse!) - clearly some people cannot get along in the outside world. Again this is generally a mental health issue. But an institution is a far cry from a bare bones prison island. The inhabitants are still people, still feel, still care, still suffer, and must be treated as such.
I think Winter Coat is much closer to a solution, despite the stated lack of solution - poverty and addiction are social issues which need to be addressed on a social level, not on the level of the individual sufferer (or not exclusively there).
But I think Incog’s prediction about the Olympics is spot on - they’ll hide the DTES as much as possible, though my addendum to the prediction is that by 2011 it will all come rushing back.
Note to Winter Coat: thank you for your thoughtful comment, and for taking the leap of sharing your family background with us. It is an enormous mark of shame upon our society that we stole children and abused them in “schools” for our racist agenda - I am happy to hear your family is fighting against that legacy.
Vex,
I understand your reticence in regards to imprisoning the mentally ill. Let me clarify, I’m not advocating imprisoning people because they are mentally ill, unless they are a danger to us, or themselves. I’m advocating imprisoning criminals, who may happen to be mentally ill.
If you have a mental illness that you are coping with, and you are a productive, law abiding citizen, great. I wish you all the best, and will even advocate spending some state funds to help you out a bit.
However if you make a choice to possess controlled substances, in contravention of the laws of the land, you should be punished. If you repeatedly do this, you should be sent away from society. So really it’s only the mentally ill who are also criminals that I want to imprison, to disallow them certain opportunities to harm themselves, and others.
The reason that your “cancer patient” analogy falls flat, is because rarely do cancer patients commit crimes to support their drug use stemming from their illness. If a cancer patient jacks a bunch of cars, let’s send him away too.
And there are many outward signs that suggest that a person won’t be a good parent. Lengthy criminal record? History of drug abuse? Probably won’t be a good parent. Live in squalor, can’t take care of yourself without assistance or intervention? Not parent material. In and out of rehab programs for Alcohol? Probably shouldn’t be getting pregnant and burdening a child with FAS.
There seems to be an underlying assumption that human beings have a right to be treated equally, period. Some might suggest this is a type of speciesist argument that Puck received such scathing criticism for not so long ago.
Are we really all of equal worth? To whom? Certainly not society it would seem. To God? That won’t sail with Vex and Co.
So why shouldn’t we lock away our criminal burdens, even if their mental illness contributes to their criminality.
And I’m much closer to a solution that the solutionless WC. Mine’s just very uncomfortable, and chock full of cold pricklies. And smacks of Facism, which scares free-living vegan hippes.
Regards,
~I.
“I understand your reticence in regards to imprisoning the mentally ill. Let me clarify, I’m not advocating imprisoning people because they are mentally ill, unless they are a danger to us, or themselves. I’m advocating imprisoning criminals, who may happen to be mentally ill.”
Ah. That is quite different.
“However if you make a choice to possess controlled substances, in contravention of the laws of the land, you should be punished. If you repeatedly do this, you should be sent away from society. So really it’s only the mentally ill who are also criminals that I want to imprison, to disallow them certain opportunities to harm themselves, and others.”
Well, I do have trouble getting behind this. Why are drugs illegal? Because they are harmful to the body? Can’t be any worse than perfectly legal tobacco. Taken chronically, worse than what alcohol does (cirrhosis, etc). Because people on them do terrible things (ie property crime)? This is almost certainly a result of the massively marked up price, a result of the so called war on drugs, which makes them dear. Interestingly enough, most people who use heroin do so irregularly, without addiction, without crime (other than the crime of purchasing), as perfectly normal members of society. Hard to believe but it’s true! Even the “hard” drugs don’t automatically make you an addict – physiological tolerance and withdrawal are neither necessary nor sufficient to diagnose addiction, and this conceptual set-up is borne out in reality, not just the research lit.
So in my opinion, there’s no reason to respect a law of the land if the law is wrong (other than fear of punishment of course). Obedience isn’t a virtue once you get out of your childhood years. In general I agree with punishment for law breaking, but our drug laws are absurd and I have little respect for them. It doesn’t bother me a tittle when people buy or use drugs, at least not from a law-abidance perspective. Drug addiction (which note is not a foregone conclusion, even with the big nasty heroin) doesn’t need to lead to being a street person, or a prostitute, or a criminal – plenty of white collar addicts show us this. Hmm, I’m getting off topic here…
Being sent away is a pretty harsh sentence. Would this be a permanent exile-hood? Wouldn’t you consider that an enormous harm to them?
“The reason that your “cancer patient” analogy falls flat, is because rarely do cancer patients commit crimes to support their drug use stemming from their illness. If a cancer patient jacks a bunch of cars, let’s send him away too.”
Well, they don’t commit crimes now that medical marijuana is legal - formerly purchasing and owning was criminal. But exactly, you’ve hit it – there’s nothing special about any drug that makes the user a criminal. Drugs aren’t the problem at all. (Wait, is that what you’re already saying?)
I’m a little uncomfortable with the stereotyping we’re engaged in here – I actually don’t know anything about how many drug addicts are also petty (or not petty) criminals, once you remove “crimes” like prostitution and mere buying and selling, which as I say, in my opinion are not crimes at all. Property crime like theft is of course a big problem, or so it seems, but I’m not even sure how common it is if we look at the entire spectrum of addicts, including alcoholics, say, who tend to be working people. Addiction is not limited to illegal drugs simply because the law of Canada tries to make us think so – people get addicted to legal drugs (sedatives, pain killers, tobacco), shopping, eating, sex, etc. I would hazard a guess that the vast majority of addicts are not criminals at all.
So I’m not really liking the implied message there, which is that addicts/mentally ill people all jack cars. Note also that being an addict is by definition being mentally ill, according to the DSM model.
Actually, am I misunderstanding you? I might be focusing too much on addiction and you’re thinking more of mental illness in general? Like, say, schizophrenics who don’t use substances at all but are homeless people? (Forgive me, I just got out of bed…!)
“And there are many outward signs that suggest that a person won’t be a good parent. Lengthy criminal record? History of drug abuse? Probably won’t be a good parent. Live in squalor, can’t take care of yourself without assistance or intervention? Not parent material. In and out of rehab programs for Alcohol? Probably shouldn’t be getting pregnant and burdening a child with FAS.”
Hmm. These are quite true points. Some people are clearly going to be, shall we say, difficult parents. A wrinkle I would add are the millions of people who pass for normal who nonetheless will totally mess up their kids, who we won’t have much hope of identifying in advance and who even if we did, how would we prove it?
Also we need to consider the role of society – what does merely living in this place at this time do to people, regardless of their parenting? What are the stresses and illness-causing elements of life in our culture? No one avoids these, but they may still exert terrible pressures on our children.
The real issue here is reproductive rights, I suppose. In a perfect world people should have the right to do as they wish with their bodies, including breed, but the reality is we live in a society where your choices cost the rest of us money, time, stress, whatever. My feeling is that it’s totally unacceptable to restrict breeding, but I agree that sometimes it’s a train wreck just waiting to happen.
“There seems to be an underlying assumption that human beings have a right to be treated equally, period. Some might suggest this is a type of speciesist argument that Puck received such scathing criticism for not so long ago.”
Wait, are we comparing humans with animals now? Surely we can agree I take a pretty supportive and equality-promoting position on animal rights…?
I would say that all people have equal rights, and because most people are moral agents, that most component have equal moral responsibilities. Being unable to understand and/or enact the responsibilities does not strip you of your rights – this is the crux of my animal rights position, where animals are afforded rights even though they cannot return the favour. (The very antithesis of speciesism!
) Likewise, humans who are unable (not just unwilling) to maintain their moral responsibilities retain their moral rights.
In this context punishment for crimes is logical and consistent. The question is, are DTES homeless people moral agents or moral patients? If the latter, punishment is not appropriate. I agree they can’t be allowed to continue doing what they’re doing if it involves stealing or violence or serious offences. Is a bare bones prison island the appropriate response? No way! Based on the psychological variables I posted about, I don’t believe most of the people living in the DTES have much of a choice about how to get along in the world. I would consider them moral patients (bracing for the blast here…!).
“Are we really all of equal worth? To whom? Certainly not society it would seem. To God? That won’t sail with Vex and Co.”
Equal worth… a very good question. No, we are not. If I had to choose to throw my husband into a pit of boiling lava or a homeless guy, I’d pick the latter, and not just because I happen to know and love my husband. I think he’s much more useful to society, probably had more and better interpersonal relationships with, has greater potential on all scales to improve the world. Or at least maintain it. But fortunately we don’t have to put people who are “worth less” into lava pits! We can try to make they worth more, capable of more. They are still human beings, albeit damaged ones, who have rights.
One problem is you can’t force people to get better. Forced treatment does not work. And one of the common problems of being all fucked up is you don’t have the perspective to see that you need to change. So if we can’t make them change, and they don’t want to change, and they are making life worse for those of us who play by the rules, what are we to do? Prison island? That will be an ongoing thing – every generation will produce its flops even after we sweep away the most obviously problematic people. The problem isn’t really solved this way. Also we must ask what the social costs of such an institution will be. Does it engender social and individual illness by its very presence? What are the costs of living in a police state?
“So why shouldn’t we lock away our criminal burdens, even if their mental illness contributes to their criminality.”
Well, I guess it depends on what you want. To punish? It works (but shouldn’t be used on moral patients). To prevent and rehabilitate? It fails. To protect the rest of us? Even if I have more potential or are “worth more” (as per the lava pit) than a DTES junkie, does that make me a more valuable human being, so much more valuable that he should be locked away forever to make my life easier? I don’t think so. And if we’re ever going to let these people off the island, that would be a disaster. Prison life damages people even more, as we know. This is one reason I dislike incarceration in general - it makes people worse by the time they get out.
And, let’s go sci-fi for a moment, what happens when the prisoners escape off the island with technology they created in secret caves?
Very Mad Max.
“And I’m much closer to a solution that the solutionless WC. Mine’s just very uncomfortable, and chock full of cold pricklies. And smacks of Facism, which scares free-living vegan hippes.”
It should scare everyone. We start prison-islanding the criminals (and who defines what is a crime? Today the murderer, tomorrow the speeder). We move then to the seriously mentally ill, because probably they’ll become criminal if they aren’t already. Third, we round up the parents who produced those first two groups of people, because clearly they can’t be allowed to breed any more and anyway, if they fucked up their kids so bad they must be pretty fucked up themselves; no telling what their nasty influence on the world is and will be. Fourth, we imprison everyone who gets below a certain score on this test of criminal tendencies and/or mental illness classification. And on and on.
The problem with fascism is that it is run by people, fallible people, who have personal agendas and greed and fear and their own mental illnesses! I don’t know or even know of a single person I would trust to run the country on a totalitarian basis. Power corrupts and all that. We just need to riffle through our history books a little to see the terrible costs of those kinds of governments.
People forget we actually live in an awesome country, with relatively few problems, lots of freedom, low stress, amazing opportunities. Things are pretty good over here! The DTES is a serious problem, of course, but not so serious that we need to start shipping people away for the rest of their lives!
You may be closer to suggesting a solution but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one! But it’s true, I don’t have a solution. Also, I don’t have any breakfast so I need to go eat now. Apologies again for this response which seems rambly and unfocused even to me…!
Vex,
The DSM is an interesting entity, an in part a reflection on the consensus of people, whom have biases and agendas. Addiction is a “illness” in the current version. Homosexuality was in previous versions. Maybe if the mentally ill could get it together enough to have a few parades, they could get it out of the book, and call it a healthy lifestyle instead of an aberrant behavior.
And I think you are criticizing my methods at least in part because they have the capacity to make mistakes, writing off people that could be saved, missing the rich functional alcoholic and abusive parents etc. (As well as being draconian, and filling you with horror and revulsion.) I maintain that while my system isn’t perfect, we could round up a great many of the worst, most obvious social offenders.
And if you are willing to concede that they are “worth less” while not being “worthless” then shouldn’t it follow with your animal rights ideals of cow over fly, man over cow, (the unit of worth measurement escapes me at present) that the well being of the many “more worths” is of greater weight than the freedom of the “less worths?”
If that’s the case, I just need to codify the worth of homeless crazy drug addict thief freedom (sterotypes aside), and the worth of normal person not having to watch a dude masturbate in public while walking to breakfast (or getting his car stolen, or health care dollars siphoned away) and then come up with an equation to illustrate that there is more “worth weight” on the side of the normals.
I shall begin the calculations.
~I.
P.S. Something is awry with your Brother / University post.
Yes, the DSM is a mixed bag. It was created to define research criteria, and its categories tend to get reified. I was trying to point out the wooliness of our criteria - addicts (by whose definition?), criminals (by whose definition?), mentally ill (by whose definition?).
I never said anything about horror or revulsion. Not sure where you got that from. But it is draconian! As I have said before in other contexts, when the world is run your way, I hope you don’t get busted speeding through a school zone. Prison island for you! And will it actually catch the worst offenders? Would your system catch the Enron people? No. It will however catch the grossest, dirtiest, least sociable people. Not sure gross (or property crime, which you mentioned more than once) is the worst problem in our society - it’s certainly not the one we need most protection from.
And no, I do not accept utilitarian arguments. There is no forced choice between “normals” and “criminals / mentally ill / addicts / whatever.” I would choose a person over a cow, but luckily, I don’t have to. I choose to let both live (this is a reference to my eating choices which have been gone over exhaustively here. My non-utilitarian stance should be well known by now.). All have a right to life. My personal comfort might be a little higher if all the “bad” people were gone, but actually my personal comfort is already pretty damn high. Increasing my glaringly enormous privilege even more at the expense of other people’s freedom is not something I want or would agree to, if given the choice.
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