Do we have them live in situations where they have some freedom of movement, but people are there to supervise them and help them as needed? That might be best, but that sort of thing is labor-intensive and crazily expensive (basically the same situation as a nursing home or assisted living, which costs around $200/day), so who's going to pay for it?Allow me to share a graphic that partially answers this question.
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| Our prison population, dominated by people from non-traditional families, has increased by a factor of 7 since the 1950s. |
If you cut that prison population in half, say, and said that each mentally ill homeless person cost four times as much to house a prisoner, you'd have the resources to care for 100,000 of them. Pick the 50 largest cities and pull 2,000 mentally ill people off the streets in each one and you'd make a huge dent.
What's never spoken in this crazed mob action against the bigoted Christians who want to keep cake from the mouths of innocent gays is what we've done to ourselves through a steady string of attacks on the traditional family. All family constructs aren't equal, not no way not no how. The fewer traditional families you have, the more opportunities you sacrifice. Caring for the homeless is one such.
You can't have it all. We've chosen to be libertines.
The increase also is happening around the same time as "deinstitutionalization" -- closing down mental hospitals, rolling back involuntary institutionalization, etc. Some people who are mentally ill are incapable of loving outside of an institution. When the progressives got all up in arms thinking "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" was typical, and demanded giving mentally ill the "freedom" to decline treatment, and, to be fair, as conservatives welcomed the closings add a way to cut back funding, the mentally ill had no where else to go and now, to many wind up in prison, where they cannot receive the sort of treatment the need.
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