On 7/16/2011 7:07 AM, HeyBub wrote:
The Daring Dufas wrote:

There were some interesting cases of people being imprisoned without
criminal charges here in Alabamastan. You mentioned disease carriers;
there was a problem with some ex-cons who would not take their
medication to keep their tuberculosis infections in check or cured.
The state had to lock them back up to protect the population even
though those folks were not violent criminals to start with. The poor
fellows wound up in prison because they did something stupid not
violent so not taking their medication for a serious disease
demonstrated how mentally ill they were. The mental illness alone
should have kept them confined somewhere and there has been a trend
to put the mentally ill in prison rather than a mental institution
where they really belonged in the first place.


Yep. Some years ago, the ACLU got all exercised about state mental
institutions. It is now the standard that a person may not be confined if
his mental illness does not present a threat to himself or others. No longer
can one be locked away because he smells funny.

Just this week a city actually MOVED a bus stop because a homeless woman
camped nearby was the source of a ghastly odor!



Back in the early 1970's I was living in Tuscaloosa, AL where the state
mental hospital, the VA mental facility and a hospital for the
criminally insane were located. This was the time when the government
ordered that a lot of people be released from mental institutions.
There were a lot of folks who were more than a bit la la wandering
around town. One of them wound up at a busy intersection directing
traffic during rush hour and business in the area were having to deal
with the slightly bonkers people wandering into their businesses plus
it caused a lot of extra work for law enforcement agencies. The whole
idea of letting those people out was nuts.

TDD