By Michele Steeb, Discovery Institute's Fix Homelessness Initiative
Across America's streets, the homeless epidemic is claiming lives, fracturing families, and eroding public safety. Often deeply intertwined with mental illness and addiction, it has become a humanitarian crisis that traps vulnerable individuals in cycles of dependence and despair while destabilizing the communities around them. This crisis has been worsened by policies that elevate the notion of "freedom" over timely, life-saving intervention. Recent events make the consequences of that choice unmistakably clear.
The Reiner family tragedy has laid this failure bare. Two parents, Rob and Michele Reiner, were brutally murdered in their Los Angeles home by their adult son - a heartbreaking outcome in the context of his long struggles with addiction, mental illness, and homelessness. Their surviving children are left traumatized, and their family is irreparably shattered.
Many cases are the results of public policy choices that ignore anosognosia - a neurological condition common in severe mental illness and addiction that strips individuals of insight into their own impairment.
When public policy relies
on voluntary compliance alone, this version of "freedom" becomes a
slow, preventable death sentence for those least capable of protecting
themselves. The result is a system paralyzed by fear of intervention, even as
untreated illness escalates into violence, loss, and irreversible harm. [more...]
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