this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2023
1 points (60.0% liked)
Politics
1025 readers
2 users here now
@politics on kbin.social is a magazine to share and discuss current events news, opinion/analysis, videos, or other informative content related to politicians, politics, or policy-making at all levels of governance (federal, state, local), both domestic and international. Members of all political perspectives are welcome here, though we run a tight ship. Community guidelines and submission rules were co-created between the Mod Team and early members of @politics. Please read all community guidelines and submission rules carefully before engaging our magazine.
founded 2 years ago
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Thank you. It's good to hear the perspective of someone who knows what it's like.
I think the problem with the American legal system is the ongoing insistence that we use it to punish rather than reform. I know that there is a small subset of people who cannot be reformed, and for those we maintain imprisonment. But that's not the majority. Most people would thrive if given the opportunity for true reformative justice.
And the secondary problem, in my opinion, is the dismantling of psychiatric facilities. Yes, we need to prevent closed-door facilities from becoming the abuse factories that they used to be. But replacing them with nothing is what got us a lot of the problems we see today (overcrowded emergency departments, deadly encounters with police, homelessness and drug use in public).
Some people need good inpatient or residential psychiatric facilities. Instead we just dumped them on their families without any social support of any kind.