State officials promise large-scale involuntary addiction and mental health treatment at Salt Lake City’s edge. Critics see “a prison, or a warehouse.”
Needless to say, people don’t go by choice, can’t leave when they want. Might be a concentration camp instead of a jail, since there’s no legal reason to force somebody into it:
As Mr. Shumway describes it, nearly two-thirds of the 1,300 homeless people potentially sent to the site could be there for involuntary treatment. About 400 beds would be set aside for psychiatric treatment. Another 400 beds would provide substance abuse treatment “as an alternative to jail,” he said, with entry and exit “not voluntary.”
You know I’ve been told Utah is a lovely place but all I see is theocratic rot masquerading as a state. The failure to deal with the Mormons in a more permanent way has been disastrous for society.
I’m in favor of involuntarily committing people addicted to drugs like fentanyl, methamphetamines, and opioids to get them clean as part of a wider initiative to get them into stable housing and build their support network.
I understand the skepticism of facilities like this and I’m not making any specific comment about the effectiveness or comprehensiveness of this one (but it’s Utah, so I can make assumptions).
That said, there is nothing compassionate about watching people out of their minds on drugs, living on the streets, and falling asleep (at best) in stairwells with needles hanging out of their arms. Progressives cannot have a platform of unrestricted homelessness and drug use like cities like Portland tried a few years ago (and walked back fairly quickly, because it made public areas unusable and unsafe).
But it’s really important to pair it with the housing and support network side of things.
Not familiar with the Portland history, but if they were actually providing health care, drug addicts would go voluntarily. Remission rates are probably a lot higher when you use force to make someone sober.
My understanding is the number of individuals that seek voluntary municipal assistance has been extremely low (like literally double digits of individuals per year). Relapse for individuals addicted to fentanyl is quite high, although deaths have been declining. One grim theory is the most addicted individuals have already died (it was literally like 100,000 deaths per year nationally).
It 100% is a concentration camp. Not even remotely our first though. And anyone who believes that psychopathic or sociopathic groups, that revel in mental and physical abuse. Will even attempt to provide psychiatric help, needs help themselves.
“An accountability center is involuntary, OK — you’re not coming in and out,” Randy Shumway, chairman of the state Homeless Services Board, said in an interview. Utah will end a harmful “culture of permissiveness,” he said, and guide homeless people “towards human thriving.”
Surely the Orwellian naming conventions of this shit was not lost on any of them
Ask a homeless person if they’d like to stay in their own hotel room for free and see how fast their “culture” changes.
Sanctuary districts
Found the Trekkie. LLAP brother.
Clearly somebody muddled in the timeline, this shit was supposed to end in 2024 not start in 2025
While a good idea to keep addicts and people with mental health problems out of jails, I do not trust this administration to take care of these people at all.
The usual pretext of being harmful to oneself or others isn’t even there. The “harm” is making people sad at the sight of a homeless person.
This, and our oppressors don’t want us to be reminded that Capitalism only works for the rich.
In an interview at his Salt Lake City office, Mr. Shumway, 53, toggled between the language of the boardroom and the pulpit. He said a “management consulting approach” would make homeless services more efficient (“we nerd out on things like Six Sigma and lean process re-engineering”), measuring individual progress through a system of behavioral targets he calls “the pathway to human thriving.”
They’re going to murder them.
we nerd out on things like Six Sigma and lean process re-engineering
Oh, god, one of those assholes. The long-running joke about Agile, Lean, Scrum, and some of these other processes is that they are run much like a cult, but if you work somewhere that has been infected with them, you either have to find or set up another job without this poison, or you have to at least parrot the bullshit.
It’s like a combo of Lysenkoism mixed with Amway…also, just like Republicanism or Communism, the process can never fail, it’s only people that fail the process… 🙄
In some cases I’m sure, but the more common result will probably be long term imprisonment and servitude. They’ll set these people up to fail one way or another.
How is this different from being jailed and receiving treatment? It looks like they want to avoid being accused of arresting/imprisoning thousands and eventually hundreds of thousands of people by doing the same thing with a different name.
The only “crime” is not having a home. So its “treating” it by sending people to a prison without due process
What kind of “treatment” do you think will be given?
Previously? Or now? Someone that I have known for a long time got treatment and she said that it sucked. She almost died twice. Even with the best of intentions (yeah, right) I expect a poor experience especially at the scale that they are talking about. However, my question is why are they doing the equivalent of arresting someone and sending them to treatment by saying that they are sending people to treatment without the formality of arresting them.
