High security hospitals

We used to have them. They eventually became a catch-all for people ranging from those who would eat someone’s face off to those that were slutty or gay. They’d get lobotomized and screwed up.

Then we decommissioned those because they were too cruel, so we then let people wander the streets, barefoot in the snowy winter until they died of exposure or self-medicated with fentanyl cut with Tranq and lost limbs. Then we determined that that was also too cruel, so now they sometimes go to prison or sometimes go on the streets, where people step over their dying bodies and say “they have a right to live on the streets and have bare feet in winter”. Some commit petty crimes just to have the warmth and safety of a shelter in a jail vs the elements.

We swing from one extreme to the other, but there’s a middle ground we have not explored yet. But it requires social workers, mandatory drug rehab, universal healthcare, free or subsidized education, public housing, and permanent beds in hospitals for mental health problems. With a few hospitals for those that are too dangerous to rejoin society fully, but with safeguards in place. All that requires commitment, majority voting, and taxpayer money, so most people just shrug and tell them to fend for themselves even if the most vulnerable want help and a better life.

We have come a long way from some of the savage and cruel punishments we did to people in the middle ages and older (see some of the European crime and punishment museums, people were inventive to say the least). But American prisons seem to fall short in many regards, too. I believe we can do better if we actually put our minds to it.