Our Insane Mental Health System

Back during the COVID pandemic, I was among the few travelers in an eerily empty Penn Station in New York City. 

We travelers seemed to be outnumbered by the homeless and police. A bicycle-pushing man’s nonsensical shouts about racism echoed through the cavernous space. The police stood in little clusters glancing outward.  

Usually, individuals like the shouting man get lost among the crowds and one knows to brush past them. But back in 2020 and 2021, this man and others like him dominated the space. It felt like being locked in an insane asylum. 

I thought to myself as I eyed the police officers, “Do something!”   

But they remained in their little clusters. 

As Barry Latzer, Professor Emeritus of Criminal Justice at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, explains, the laws against such behavior are, 

“at most misdemeanors, or often, city ordinances that are considered violations, even less punitive than misdemeanors. So, anyone arrested for loitering is likely to spend no more than a day or two in jail, after which he’ll go before a judge who will set him free.”  

 The problem is in enforcement.  

But given that most of these people are mentally ill – as the ranting man clearly was – enforcement of loitering laws alone would be “pretty useless.” What is needed is “civil commitment to a facility for those psychotic and dangerous,” says Latzer. 

E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., explains in American Psychosis: How the Federal Government Destroyed the Mental Illness Treatment System, state-run asylums that used to house such individuals were shut down after the Kennedy Administration began granting federal funds to community centers, an initiative continued and expanded by Lyndon Johnson. At the same time, there was a shift in attitudes toward the mentally ill, as evidenced by Thomas Szasz’s The Myth of Mental Illness. Revelations of abuses at state psychiatric hospitals also were exaggerated by Ken Kesey’s popular One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

 The community centers were plagued by financial corruption and largely utilized by those facing challenges like divorce or low-level depression, and not the severely mentally ill.  Those who suffer from anosognosia – a condition that prevents individuals from recognizing their own illness, and afflicting those with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and Alzheimer’s – are unaware of their mental illness; they need supervision to ensure that they take their medication.  

Since the 1980s the addicted and psychotic have wandered our streets. But it’s not just about the disruption in the civic contract. Untreated serious mental illness sometimes results in death or injury. One never knows if the ranting man will be the next one to push you onto the train tracks.

Consider just a few recent cases: 

• Thomas Crooks, 20, killed by a sharpshooter after he killed Corey Comperatore in the process of trying to assassinate Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, on July 13, 2024.

• Jordan Neely, 30, who, on May 1, 2023, had been wrestled to the floor by Daniel Penny, to prevent him from carrying out threats on a subway car, and died with illegal drugs in his system.

• Daniel Prude, 41, who ran naked through the streets of Rochester, New York, at 3:00 a.m. on March 23, 2020. After police restrained him on the ground, his heart and breathing stopped and was restored in the ambulance. But he did not recover brain function and on March 30 was taken off life support.

• Ahmaud Arbery, 25, who was shot and killed on February 23, 2020, during an attempted citizen’s arrest by father and son, Greg and Travis McMichael, both military veterans (Greg was also retired police officer).

Further:  

• On the one-year anniversary of the assassination attempt it was reported that Crooks had been “unraveling” for about a year, during which time his father heard him talking to himself and dancing around his bedroom late at night.

• Neely had had over a dozen encounters with police due to his mental health issues. According to his aunt, he had developed depression, PTSD, and schizophrenia since the 2007 murder of his mother; he had been “in and out” of Bellevue Hospital. He had also spent more than a year in prison for violently attacking a woman and had threatened to kill his grandfather.

• Prude was not diagnosed with a mental illness, according to news reports, but did admit to drinking and using marijuana and PCP.

• Arbery had been diagnosed in December 2018 with schizoaffective disorder and had had numerous run-ins with the law. On the day of his death he was on probation for his second felony, was off his prescribed medication, and had THC, the main psychoactive compound in marijuana, in his system. His own mother admitted to being afraid of him.

Individuals with severe mental illness are more likely to be violent, the late mental health advocate and Manhattan Institute fellow DJ Jaffe told mental health and substance abuse professionals in 2018.  He upset the mantra dominating their profession that the mentally ill are no more likely to be violent than everyone else. Jaffe became a mental health advocate after he and his wife took in his wife’s half-sister who had schizophrenia.  

Jaffe was instrumental in having New York Governor George Pataki sign Kendra’s Law, named after Kendra Webdale, who in 1999 was killed after being pushed onto the subway tracks by a stranger with untreated schizophrenia. It became a model for court-ordered and court-monitored Assisted Outpatient Therapy (AOT) programs across the country.  

Jaffe’s book, Insane Consequences: How the Mental Health Industry Fails the Mentally Ill, indicts the mental health system for spending billions on mental “wellness” and underfunding programs for the seriously mentally ill, who make up about four percent of the American population. Only about half receive treatment; many self-medicate and are addicted to drugs.

Jaffe was also instrumental in the passage of the Helping Families in Mental Health Crisis Act of 2016. Title V calls for “increasing access to treatment for serious mental illness.” Disputes between Democrats and Republicans, however, have interfered with provisions, such as Medicaid funding for hospitalization and the ability of health care providers to share mental health information with families or caregivers. Democrats tend to blame extrinsic factors, such as guns, for the acts of the mentally ill. Jaffe disagreed, as he described the Parkland, Florida, school shooter.  

Recognizing the likely resistance in the audience to his message in 2018, Jaffee pointed out that, unlike other illnesses, those treating the mentally ill need protection. Psychiatric units are locked. Nurses have panic buttons.  

Although most “emotionally disturbed person” calls are handled without incident, over 25 percent of on-duty deaths of police officers are due to EDP calls.

According to the Treatment Advocacy Center (TAC), founded by Dr. Torrey, “individuals with untreated mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed during an encounter with police.” They make up at least 20 percent of inmates in jails and prisons. Jaffe, in rebuke of the narrow criteria for involuntary commitment—of imminent danger—advocated “treatment before tragedy.”

The Exploitation of Mental Illness by Politicians 

Ironically, it was Daniel Prude who had a new law named after him. It passed this legislative session in New York.

Daniel’s Law, or S3670, was prompted by Black Lives Matter protests after the March 23 police video was released to the public by the family on September 2, 2020. Protestors charged that police had “murdered” Prude. Benjamin Crump jumped in. 

Daniel’s Law calls for “non-police, community-run crisis first responder teams utilizing peers [those with a similar “lived experience”] and independent emergency medical technicians.” Police will be called when a person “experiencing a mental health, alcohol use, or substance use crisis” “refuses treatment or transport” or “poses a substantial risk of physical harm.” The teams will “receive culturally competent, trauma-informed, experientially based and peer-led training.”  

The law aims to ensure that “as few New Yorkers as possible experience nonconsensual transport, use of force, or criminal consequences as a result of mental health, alcohol use or substance abuse crises.” After a year, reporting must be done on how many “underserved and historically excluded communities, including black, indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) populations” were served, “the diversion of individuals from jails, incarceration, or similar settings,” as well as from “psychiatric hospitals, commitments . . . and other involuntary services.”  Similar demographic criteria are to be applied to the state council. A recent posting shows $6 million allocated for a pilot program. 

Unfortunately, the bill’s sponsors and cosponsors (all Democrats, as are the governor and both legislative chambers), along with endorsers, seem to share an agenda beyond helping the seriously mentally ill. In 2024, the Senate Mental Health Committee chair Samra Brouk revealed a panoply of supporters not only dedicated to mental health, like NAMI-National Alliance on Mental Illness (NYC and NYS), Mental Health Alliance of NYS, and Alliance for Rights and Recovery, but also groups that advocate for larger leftist causes, such as supporting democratic socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, immigration rights, and climate justice. These include the New York Civil Liberties Union, New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, Citizen Action, Working Families Party, and the Rochester Monroe Anti-Poverty Initiative.  

Three members of the New York State Black Legislative Task Force in April 2025 penned  A New Response for a Statewide Crisis: Why Daniel’s Law Matters Now. Brouk described spending “years listening to the experiences of families, community members, and experts who all agree: our mental health response is broken—and it tragically and disproportionately affects our Black and Brown New Yorkers.

Assemblyman Landon Dais called for balancing “public safety with civil rights and due process.” The Bronx resident claimed to understand commuters’ fears but warned about throwing “anyone who looks mentally ill into a jail cell.”

As he cautioned against repeating “the mistakes of past overreaches,” which one would expect to be a reference to the ease with which relatives long ago could institutionalize family members in sometimes abusive facilities, he veered off topic, comparing the overreaches to “recent actions that led to a Maryland man being wrongfully deported to El Salvador.” In spite of this non-sequitur, he claimed, “This isn’t about ideology.” He praised Daniel’s Law for taking pressure off police departments, providing communities with support, and protecting those calling for help.

Assemblyman Kwani B. O’Pharrow went back to his experience as a former New York City Police Detective, when he would respond “to calls involving individuals in the midst of severe mental health crises—scenes that were unpredictable, emotionally charged, and often unsafe for everyone involved, including the officers.” He said that too much is asked of police officers who are not trained to be mental health professionals, a point that Torrey makes in his book. Daniel’s Law, however, promises to make things potentially more difficult. 

Barking Up the Wrong Tree 

Daniel’s Law could have made the situation worse on the night of March 22-23, 2020. 

According to State Attorney General Letitia James’s report, Daniel Prude was suffering from drug use. While traveling from Chicago to visit his brother Joe in Rochester, he was evicted from an Amtrak train in Buffalo for smoking cigarettes. When he encountered police officers, he told them his phone had been stolen. He admitted that he had consumed “a lot of beer” and was drunk. He also volunteered, “And I smoke a little PCP and marijuana now and then.” 

His brother picked him up from a shelter. At Joe’s home in Rochester, after watching him act suicidally, jumping “head-first down the basement stairs,” his brother’s wife made a call at 6:52 p.m. for a “mental hygiene arrest.” She said that Daniel was “coming off of leaf and hallucinating” but did not have a mental health history. He was transported to Strong Memorial Hospital around 7:30 p.m. but was released at 11:00 p.m.  

A note in James’s report explains that leaf is a type of cigarette dipped in embalming fluid and phencyclidine (PCP). A police officer sent out a warning about a similar situation he had experienced. But a footnote remarks that “PO Vaughn’s act of broadcasting that information over the radio . . .  is evidence of PO Vaughn’s state of mind regarding interactions with people using PCP. He advised that in the prior incident he had been involved in, it took numerous officers to restrain an individual who dove headfirst through an open patrol car window while naked, handcuffed, and on a psychoactive drug.”  

James recommended training in excited delirium syndrome, which makes one “vulnerable to cardiopulmonary arrest and sudden death, especially when restrained.” But “commonly cited symptoms of an ExDS, such as “reduced sensitivity to pain, aggression, and extreme strength,” are “features that overlap with racist stereotypes of Black men,” putting them in danger. And it can be a “post-hoc diagnosis to shield police from brutality claims.”  

The police cams of the events at 3:00 a.m. reveal that Officer Vaughn’s warnings were applicable. A video clip widely distributed on television shows the officers holding Prude down on the street. But the full video shows that although Prude initially obeyed the order to lie face down to be handcuffed, he became increasingly agitated, thrashing about, alternating vulgarities with appeals to “Jesus,” and demanding repeatedly, “give me your gun.” After rolling over, he began sitting up and tried to get to his feet. He was also spitting at police officers, one of whom he had told that he had COVID. A mesh spit hood was placed over his head, but this made him more agitated. That’s when the police held him down. 

In another video, of the police officer who went to Joe Prude’s home, Joe can be heard expressing his shock and dismay that the hospital had released Daniel after only a “few hours.” Joe worried that Daniel would jump in front of the train. (In the video of the handcuffing, an officer tells another that he had witnessed Daniel run into the street and nearly get hit by a car.) Joe Prude described Daniel as calm after returning from the hospital until he had suddenly jumped up after Joe had gotten up to get some cigarettes and ran out his back door.

Clearly, Daniel Prude had been released from the hospital too soon.  

A medical examiner testified that Prude had died of a heart attack caused by “excited delirium.” In February 2021, a grand jury decided not to indict on criminally negligent homicide charges. The police body cam footage shows police acting with care and restraint. But Mayor Malik D. Evans announced that the city of Rochester would pay Prude’s five children $12 million after protestors, some naked and wearing spit hoods, some rushing City Hall, and some carrying signs for BLM and calling for “Daniel’s Law,” made the news.

Attorney General Letitia James, announcing the grand jury’s decision and her recommendations in training,  passage of “Daniel’s Law,” alternatives to spit hoods, and implementation of a policy for release of footage from body-worn cameras, again made this a racial issue. She claimed that law enforcement officers were not held adequately “accountable for the unjustified killing of African Americans.” She cited “the influences of race, from the slave codes to Jim Crow, to lynching, to the war on crime, to the overincarceration of people of color: Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd. And now Daniel Prude.”  

But James never mentioned the one thing that could have prevented the tragedy of March 23: the confinement of Daniel Prude at the hospital. Nor is it likely that a future Daniel Prude will be helped by “Daniel’s Law.” In fact, crisis response teams may get hurt or be unable to restrain a future Daniel Prude for his safety. Instead of passing a law that would have strengthened involuntary commitment, James chose to scapegoat police and promote a false narrative about racism.

New Involuntary Commitment Standards in New York 

Daniel’s Law also seems to conflict with another state law – S3007. The new standard is part of the budget deal promoted by Governor Kathy Hochul. S3007 loosens involuntary commitment from “likelihood of serious harm to oneself or others” to “a substantial risk of physical harm due to an inability or refusal, as a result of their mental illness, to provide for their own essential needs such as food, clothing, necessary medical care, personal safety, or shelter.”

But New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, one of the groups supporting Daniel’s Law, opposes involuntary commitment and even AOT (Assisted Outpatient Treatment). The New York affiliate of the ACLU (a major litigator in the movement to close down asylums) also supports Daniel’s Law.

Andrew Wilson recounted his own experiences in an article for the TAC website. In his view, Wilson calls Daniel’s Law for those experiencing mental health emergencies “a step in the right direction.” But clinical intervention needs to come “early”—before a “full psychiatric break.”  

Wilson himself needed “someone to step in long before the hallucinations and paranoia took over,” he wrote to me. “Medication could have restored my insight, but only if I had been guided into treatment, even if it was involuntary.” Referring to anosognosia, Wilson describes the “Catch-22 . . . when your illness prevents you from recognizing you’re sick.”  

In addition to advocating for involuntary commitment if needed, Wilson encourages “structured, compassionate, and accountable” court-ordered and monitored AOT that includes a dedicated psychiatrist, a trauma-informed therapist, a case manager, a peer support specialist, a housing/employment advocate, and someone to handle court and compliance reviews. 

Wilson seems to have made amazing progress from an illness which sounds absolutely hellish, including three years of homelessness. This is especially true given that he lacked support from family and friends.  

Tying the Hands of Family 

There are family members desperate to help who have been held back by a legal system that maintains the “imminent danger” criteria for involuntary commitment. Pleas from family members are ignored.   

One anonymous mother’s description of a system waiting for a crime, unfortunately, describes the situation in most states. Her son who suffers from schizophrenia was not able to get help and was incarcerated. On four occasions, she begged professionals and emergency services to hospitalize him but was told that he was “not dangerous enough.” He would have to meet the criteria for arrest. Privacy laws shield even parents from gaining knowledge about their adult children’s health; this mother’s son lost a hundred pounds during one of his incarcerations.  

Another mother, Martha Stringer, wrote a story about such standards that left her helpless for her bipolar daughter, who ended up in a jail cell “lying naked in urine and feces with only a soiled suicide smock on, being pepper sprayed and confined to a restraint chair for not responding to verbal commands.” Ironically, many civil libertarians point to the horrors of asylums far back in history with similar scenes to argue against involuntary treatment. 

The pleas of family members are drowned out by those who claim to be advocates for the mentally ill—lawyers fighting for their “civil liberties,” lawyers profiting from “wrongful death” lawsuits and publicity; mental health advocates fighting “stigma” by denying facts; “wellness” experts giving the false impression that their programs can prevent serious mental illnesses; politicians and social justice advocates working against the problem with false charges of racism in order to advance themselves. 

It remains to be seen how well New York’s S3007 will work. Given the political climate one can foresee charges of discrimination if there is a disparate impact. 

Blaming the Good Citizen in Georgia  

The majority of states in TAC’s “Grading the States: An Analysis of Involuntary Psychiatric Treatment Laws” report received poor grades for maintaining an imminent danger standard for involuntary treatment, which then is usually limited to between 48 and 72 hours.

Andrew Wilson said that Florida, where he was living at the time of his crisis, did not have a good program for early intervention and involuntary treatment.  Georgia, the state in which Ahmaud Arbery died, is among the states that TAC criticizes for the imminent danger standard.

Georgia failed Arbery, who was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, and three men, the McMichaels and neighbor William “Roddy” Bryan, who recorded the altercation on his cell phone and is serving a life sentence with opportunity for parole after 35 years. In the attempt to help police catch a two-time felon, the McMichaels found themselves convicted of murder by the state of Georgia and of hate crimes by the federal government. The truth was that, like the case of Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, Travis McMichael found himself in a life-and-death struggle and shot Arbery in self-defense.

As with Trayvon Martin, a younger and more innocent picture of Ahmaud Arbery—the 25-year-old’s high school graduation portrait—was presented to the public. He was repeatedly portrayed as a “jogger.” 

But more recent videos and stills show an angry and clearly troubled man. Arbery, as had been his habit, was running away from the crime scene, as he did when shoplifting and trespassing. On February 23, 2020, after being caught casing a house under construction near the McMichaels in Satilla Shores near Brunswick for the fourth time, Arbery, contrary to news reports of being chased down, ignored requests by Travis to stop and wait for police as he pulled up alongside him. Arbery gave a blank stare.

In the widely circulated video from Bryan’s cell phone, one sees Arbery, instead of running away into open spaces, running toward the truck after it had been parked on the road, then around the back to the passenger side, and then to the front and around to where Travis was standing with his shotgun on the driver’s side. Arbery, in a suicidal move, charged at Travis and attempted to wrest his shotgun away with one hand while punching his head with the other.  

No Sunday Jogger 

The defense cited ten cases of Arbery’s illegal activity, including two felonies. Arbery had police called on him by white and black citizens for trespassing and theft. He fought with law enforcement, ran away when confronted, and used marijuana.

In 2013, the year after Arbery graduated from Brunswick High School, he was involved in an apparent gang fight. Later that year, he was convicted for felony gun possession for bringing a gun to Brunswick High School and was also found guilty of “three counts of felony obstruction of an officer for his violent non-compliance with arrest that resulted in injury to officers.” He received probation. 

In November 2017, Arbery was found parked in an area known for drug trafficking with an expired license, acted hostilely toward the police officer, and refused a request to search his car. The officer called for backup and tried to tase Arbery. Arbery ran away. The officer reported that he smelled marijuana through the open window of Arbery’s car.

On February 6, 2018, Arbery entered a guilty plea to felony shoplifting, for trying to shoplift a television from a Walmart. He resisted arrest. On June 17, Arbery’s mother called 911 in fear from inside her locked car when he would not give her back her car keys. On August 21, a neighbor, a black woman married to a sheriff deputy, reported Arbery in her backyard. Body camera recorded him looking into her car windows. Arbery falsely told police that he had been out “running” and threatened to “whip” his “ass.” He was not arrested. On October 23, Arbery ran when he was approached by deputies for trespassing inside a mobile home owned by a black woman. When caught later, he claimed that he “was just out running.”

“In 2019 and 2020 Arbery was repeatedly seen attempting to enter neighboring homes through their windows” and, when confronted, took off running. Arbery became known as “the jogger” for “running up in front of convenience stores, going through stretching motions,” entering the store to seize items, and then flee with the merchandise. 

On December 8, 2018, as a result of the order by the sentencing judge, and after his mother and probation officer expressed concern, Arbery had a mental health evaluation. He was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder but stopped taking prescribed medication, because, as he told his probation officer, it upset his stomach.  

Arbery never continued “the therapeutic intervention that was ordered,” as the defense stated. The defense had wanted to call an expert witness “to explain the behavioral effect of unmedicated schizoaffective disorder and the reliable data showing the exacerbating effect upon the illness of the ingestion (in any form), of marijuana.” The autopsy showed effects that would increase “the likelihood and degree of Ahmaud Arbery’s confrontational and combative moods, his aggressive reaction to his triggers (which he identified as ‘being told what to do’), as well as his auditory hallucinations (which he had reported as voices telling him to ‘hurt people,’ and ‘to steal and rob’).”

Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley ruled that Arbery’s mental health records could not be used. Nor was Arbery’s criminal history allowed. When he was caught shoplifting the TV, he had his first offender probation for the prior felony offense revoked. Arbery was sentenced to five years imprisonment but was allowed to serve it on probation. Eleven days before the fatal shooting, five or six police officers, along with as many citizens, searched where Arbery was caught on security camera in the home under construction.

The defense argued that Arbery was aware that a conviction of felony trespass on February 23, 2020, would mean the revocation of his probation and almost certain  prison time.

After three prosecutors had determined that both men had acted lawfully on February  23 (one of them, Jackie Johnson, had recused herself the day after the shooting because Greg McMichael had worked as an investigator in her office), the state took over.

A Narrative Takes Over 

After the video from Bryan’s cell phone was released to the public, the media began following the narrative of New York Times’ Charles Blow’s inflammatory May 6, 2020 column that referred back to slavery, Black Codes, and Jim Crow. Blow charged that Arbery “had committed no offense” other than being “black and male and running through these white men’s neighborhood.”

With no new evidence, but a lot of doxxing, death threats, harassment, and protests organized by Black Lives Matter and the NAACP, the case was handed over to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation under the direction of Governor Brian Kemp. On May 7, the McMichaels were arrested in their front yard in front of pre-stationed cameras and Travis’s three-year-old son.

No grand jury hearing was held. On May 10, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr requested a federal investigation, and on May 11 announced that Cobb County District Attorney Joyette Holmes, who is black, would lead the case. On May 21, Bryan was arrested. On June 24 all three were charged with murder. On April 28, 2021, Bryan and the McMichaels were indicted on federal hate crime charges, which were unsubstantiated.  

Judge Walmsley denied the request for a mistrial requested by the defense due to Black Panther protestors carrying automatic weapons and parading a coffin with the names of the defendants on it around the courthouse. In fact, Walmsley, after the trial, in a talk about “diversity” to the Stetson University Law Student Bar Association, bragged that protestors demonstrated outside the courthouse and that Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson sat in on the proceedings.  

Politicians had jumped in immediately. President Trump called the video “disturbing,” but also said that events outside of the video could offer a fuller account. He was putting his trust in Governor Kemp. Presidential candidate Joe Biden tweeted, “The video is clear: Ahmaud Arbery was killed in cold blood.”  

Kemp, however, invited Arbery’s mother Wanda Cooper-Jones to the signing of House Bill 479 that repealed the citizen’s arrest law. A new hate crime law was passed. The Georgia House of Representatives made February 23 of each year “Ahmaud Arbery Day.” 

The Failures of the State 

If Arbery was a victim, he was a victim of the state that Kemp governs. The state failed to punish Arbery for his crimes. The probation oversight, as evidenced by the fact that Arbery had THC in his system and was allowed to go off critical medication, failed.

Instead of changing the state mental health laws, Georgia politicians cravenly succumbed to the mob. The McMichaels were left to deal with the consequences. It should have been Georgia’s criminal justice and mental health system that was put on trial. 

And in New York, will future Daniel Prudes again be released from hospitals after a few hours? Will the new standards take the seriously mentally ill off the streets? 

At the federal level, MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) reveals a “blind spot”: the seriously mentally ill. The focus continues on the “worried well” as the number of practitioners continues to swell and the diagnostic criteria for mental disorders in the Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) expands from 300 conditions to nearly a thousand. 

President Trump’s July 24 Executive Order, “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” prompted by the tent cities in the nation’s capital, aims to take the homeless, of which two-thirds are mentally ill or drug-addicted, off the streets and into treatment programs.

The Justice Department will roll back regulations that keep states and businesses from removing homeless people from the streets. It will use federal funding to incentivize officials to “enforce prohibitions on open illicit drug use, urban camping and loitering, and urban squatting.” Funds will be shifted away from “harm reduction” programs that offer such things as clean drug paraphernalia. Instead of going to programs to house homeless people, money will go to programs that first require sobriety and treatment. Cities that enforce homeless camping bans will be prioritized.

This is a step in the right direction, even if the effort is limited to the homeless. But critical questions need to be addressed. 

Will governors Hochul and Kemp take advantage of the greater power to put people into treatment centers? Will Governor Kemp take this as a cue to remove the imminent danger standard for the seriously mentally ill? Will he reform Georgia’s criminal justice system so that probationers are no longer allowed to wander neighborhoods high on drugs, hearing voices telling them to harm people? Will he do something for the men serving life sentences when they found themselves dealing with their state’s failures? 

This monthly series is presented by George Violin