Seeking a path between warehousing and enabling the troubled

Last week, CBS-17 reported on a local Raleigh man, Brice Forman, who had 38 arrests, largely in the downtown area called Glenwood South, where many of the town’s bars are. The arrests frequently involved multiple charges for things related to theft, breaking and entering, trespassing, assault, breaking into motor vehicles, possession of drug paraphernalia, being intoxicated and disruptive, panhandling, and (in the latest arrest) a concealed weapon.

In the report, CBS-17 spoke to people on the street and at the businesses about the fact that, despite police frequently arresting and booking Forman, he remained in the community, where he would frequently do things like grab patrons food, start fights with passersby for no apparent reason, and engage in what they called odd and concerning behavior.

Journalist Chris Arnade — who, despite being a self-identified New York City socialist, has received praise by the likes of JD Vance and Tucker Carlson — focuses his work on areas of the country saturated in poverty and disorder.

Arnade said, on a recent trip on a Chicago commuter train, he witnessed open drug use, horrors of human hygiene, and people experiencing disturbing breaks with reality, but, “This didn’t shock me, or anyone else around me, since I’d seen some variation of this dystopian scene on every Chicago metro line I’d ridden, every pedestrian walkway I’d passed through, and on most street corners.”

Same in Indianapolis, El Paso, New York City, Jacksonville, LA, Phoenix, and almost every community I’ve been to in the U.S., save for those gated by wealth. An epidemic of mental illness and/or addiction plays out in the U.S. in public, with our streets, buses, parking lots, McDonald’s, parks, and Starbucks as ad hoc institutions for the broken, addicted, and tortured.

But after focusing his work overseas the last few years, Arnade has noticed something: The United States is alone among developed nations in allowing the kind of disorder being tolerated on Raleigh’s Glenwood South, on the Charlotte transit system, and in countless other cities. And he gets frustrated hearing his fellow left-wingers say it’s just part of living in a big city.

No, the rest of the world doesn’t tolerate the amount of antisocial behavior we in the U.S. do… Someone peeing on the subway is not of sound mind… It’s a sign of distress that should cause an intervention—by police, social workers, whoever—that mandates them into an institution for a period of time, until they regain sanity and stability. For someone actively psychotic —civil commitment to psychiatric hospital. For violent individuals refusing treatment—secure prison facilities with mandatory programs. For severe addiction—medical detox and residential treatment without the ability to walk away…

It isn’t fair to the public, especially the working people who have to deal with them on a daily basis. It isn’t fair to the person themselves. The idea that it is empathetic to allow someone to suffer on the streets tortured by their inner demons, covered in filth, high as a kite, is so backwards and immoral that I cannot believe that the activists and politicians who support it have spent any time around these people. They need help, and if they don’t accept it, then you must force them to get help.

And you know who agrees with that? The North Carolina voters, by a wide margin. A recent CJ Poll, asked respondents whether we should increase the use of involuntary commitment to ensure people with mental illness get the treatment they need. The results were 70% in favor and only 16% opposed.

The General Assembly keyed in on this subject after the death of Iryna Zarutska. In addition to “Iryna’s Law,” which made it more difficult to release repeat offenders, they now have a committee investigating the state of involuntary commitment. If, like Arnade suggests, they should be put in mandatory treatment, would there be enough funding and space to allow for that?

The family of Decarlos Brown, the man charged with Zarutska’s murder, tried to have him involuntarily committed. But though a judge approved their request, he was released due to lack of capacity. His sister said Brown, a paranoid schizophrenic, believed he was controlled by computer chips he called “the material.” When she spoke with him after the killing, a recording of their jail phone call obtained by WSOC showed he remained obsessed with the idea his actions were not in his control.

“I just know it’s the material inside my body, though,” Brown said. “They have to get it removed because it’s making me a murderer… I don’t even know the lady. I never said one word to the lady; that’s scary, isn’t it? Why would I stab someone for no reason? Before you actually charge me with murder, make sure it was me that did it, not the material. And I’m telling you the material did it.”

Does that sound like somebody who should have been out walking the streets after 14 arrests and a judge’s order that he was a danger due to a severe mental illness? As Arnade said, in most developed countries, they would think the answer is obvious: Place the man in a secure place where he can receive treatment, for his own good and for the good of others.

We were too late in Brown’s case. But for the Formans of the world, they are still out there, picking fights, hitting strangers with rebar, and lunging at people walking their dogs in the middle of the day.

Zoe Welsh, a teacher in Raleigh, was killed recently after Ryan Camacho — who had allegedly stalked her, assaulted her husband, and been arrested 20 times for various crimes — allegedly ended up killing her, despite her many calls to 911. Camacho’s family also tried to have involuntarily committed. So did the family of the alleged mass shooter at a Southport marina restaurant last year, where three died and many others were injured.

Failure of large mental institutions

There was a time when the United States did commit those who were deemed “criminally insane” or otherwise unable to care for themselves to long-term in-patient treatment. But some very real horror stories from these institutions caused the nation to pivot quickly away from them in the 1960s. President John F. Kennedy signed a bill to reallocate funds from the larger institutions into smaller mental health facilities embedded within communities. The first part of the plan, defunding the mental hospitals, went smoothly. But the second part, creating a network of community-based replacements never really materialized.

It was very understandable why the old system was abandoned. There were Upton Sinclair-style exposés, like “Titicut Follies,” which in 1968 film critic Roger Ebert called “one of the most despairing documentaries I have ever seen; more immediate than fiction because these people are real; more savage than satire because it seems to be neutral. We are literally taken into a madhouse. Inmates of varying degrees of mental illness are treated with the same casual inhumanity.”

Ebert describes an elderly man in the Massachusetts State Hospital for the Criminally Insane named Jim who is relentlessly mocked and tormented by the guards, shaved aggressively to cut his face, and left naked in his cell because giving him clothes would be a hassle. Another “patient” is hounded for not getting any better, and despairingly, he agrees that the facility appears instead to be making him worse.

We certainly should not go back to those days. Any institutions would need much better oversight and connection with the outside world. But neither should we leave those with severe addictions and mental health problems on the street to be a danger to themselves and others.

See the chart below from The Economist Magazine, which shows fairly clearly what the effect has been of shutting the asylums — not gentler community care, or even saved taxpayer funding, but just more people committing crimes and ending up in prison (likely after harming innocent members of the public) — prisons that are probably even worse for their conditions than the institutions in “Titicut Follies.”

It will be up to those in the legislature to take sober account of past and present failures and find a new path, somewhere between locking the most troubled among us into cold, cruel institutions and enabling public disorder.

“Seeking a path between warehousing and enabling the troubled” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.