I know what you are thinking. No, it was not Jon Corzine.
Earlier this week, a former governor of New Jersey went undercover to expose the struggle homeless people go through if they are mentally ill.
Democratic state Sen. Richard Codey, who briefly took over as governor after Jim McGreevey (D) resigned in 2004, began calling homeless shelters last November only to find out that they were hesitant to take “crazy people,” required ID or that the person be on welfare.
“To find some place to take you if you were homeless was impossible, essentially, unless you were on some government entitlement program,” he explained to NBC New York.
After spending an hour with a makeup artist to make him unrecognizable, Codey took on the fictional identity of Jimmy Peters, a mentally ill man who had been recently released from a local hospital’s psychiatric ward.
Case worker Ross Croesmann was able to get the former governor into Goodwill Rescue Mission in downtown Newark for one night. Other shelters refused to take him at all.Read the rest at Raw Story
Former NJ gov. poses as mentally ill man at homeless shelter
by David Edwards
2 comments:
Tom, Ive seen a small bit of this first hand, tough to understand... even tougher to explain to kids who are there and getting old enough to figure out what is really going on... the young ones look at you and dont even have to speak and you know what they are thinking... lately Ive been telling them that they are going to have to take over some day and set this right... all I can come up with.
resp,
This is a pretty knotty problem, Matt, with a lot of issues involved. I've some experience with it, both personally and anecdotally from friends and acquaintances.
In California, for instance, when Ronald Reagan was governor, he disbanded many mental institutions, which was controversial at the time. The issue was locking people up that were not a danger to themselves or others, but just had difficulty coping in society, some moderately and other more seriously.
There's an argument from the side of freedom for not locking people up "for their own good," and turning people loose that cannot take care of themselves properly. Many can't get it together to apply for the benefits they are due for, example, and other just don't want them for their own "reasons," and they cannot even be convinced to accept them when approached.
Mental illness is a difficult matter to deal with, even under the best of circumstances. There are no simple solutions, and anything that would have a hope of success would take quite a commitment of resources.
Reagan apparently felt that this was not in the public interest, given his other priorities. Again, it comes down to political choices over how to distribute resources between public and private and within the public sector.
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