State Quiz - Oklahoma

This is a fine platitude, but it's nothing more than that. I spent years working full-time providing holistic legal services to people entwined with the justice system. We offered them mental health services, along with every other resource you can imagine: therapy, housing, school support, job training. Everything. Provided by really dedicated true believers who badly wanted these people to succeed.

And it worked great for some of them. But others weren't ready yet. They wouldn't take the help. So what are the rest of our citizens to do while a guy with violent tendencies refuses treatment? Just accept that he will terrorize us on the subway and we need to live with it? Hope that his attack is not serious? That is not fair.

I vehemently agree that we need to prioritize mental health treatment over the punitive approach of our current system, but whenever you press someone for details on what that looks like, they don't have an answer. It's not that simple.

And "mental health issues" is very broad. It's not all schizophrenia. One young man I worked with had mental health issues simply because he grew up in the 'hood. His dad was in and out of jail. He got involved with gangs, and two of his close friends were murdered before he turned 17. It messed him up. It made him so, so angry. But he was a street kid. He wanted to be "hard" and keep up his "rep," so he flatly refused to go to therapy, because the word of some guy in his 30s was nothing to him. The opinion of his homies was all that mattered. And a lot of those homies went through the same thing he did, so they were prioritizing the same bad choices he was making.

This is what people mean by "the cycle of poverty and violence" in American cities. It's absolutely brutal, and we need to solve it.

But we can't hold innocent citizens hostage in the meantime. The current mayor in Chicago refuses to acknowledge the problem with our youth. They organize "street takeovers" where they all go downtown on a Saturday night and just terrorize whoever is there. Cars get flipped. People get shot. "Oh, it's just that youth have no third spaces. It's not their fault." Come on. There is a middle ground.

We can't throw these people away in jail forever and make them hardened criminals. But we also can't tell law-abiding people, "They're gonna terrorize you occasionally, but we don't want to detain them because that's bad. So...just live with it."

Last thought: for some people, a very short jail stint is the best thing that will ever happen to them, because it's the wake up call they need to finally get their act together and get out of a criminal life that usually ends in the morgue. I've seen it firsthand. Years in prison will kill you. Three months in jail can save your life.