[DrJosiah]

> When someone commits a crime, we call him a criminal and remove him from society for a while.

Wow. I've received 3 speeding tickets, and 2 right on red tickets in my life. I committed a crime. I paid fines. I was not removed from society.

That is the case with a huge number of crimes, today, otherwise we would have an even worse prison problem.

> I see no reason to abandon this tradition now.

We've already abandoned it, and we are reducing the sizes of prisons as you prattle on about the problems of vagrancy.

Let's get mental health care facilities, rehab, and more, to the levels that existed before Republicans gutted them starting in the 50's. I don't know, like institute new-deal type things so people aren't wanting for basic needs, and maybe vagrancy will go away.

Well, it did the last time we did that.

Why wouldn't we do the exact same thing that worked last time?

[quotemstr]

What happens when people refuse to use these new rehab facilities, preferring a life of drugs on the street? I'm all for improved mental health care, but at some point, we need to involuntarily remove vagrants from the street and put them in places where they can get help overcoming their problems.

[DrJosiah]

> What happens when people refuse

So give them that chance to say no. Right now, you're advocating for paying $81k/year (average for CA prisons) to keep people in prison, instead of trying to fix the underlying causes. Estimates put the number of homeless people in California at roughly 120k+, including families, children, etc.

So if we solve the problem as you are proposing, by putting them in prison right now, that's $9.7 billion / year. It would more than double the current California prison population, from current 115k people, to 235k+, and we'd need new child prisons, because a lot of those homeless folks are families with children.

Putting "vagrants" and other "homeless" people in prison is stupidly expensive, pointlessly punitive, and doesn't solve the underlying economic or social problems. It doesn't stop people from being poor, it just makes being poor suck worse than it already does. All you've done is put a bunch of vulnerable people in prison.

[quotemstr]

There is no economic problem. We're in the best job market in half a century, perhaps the best ever. If a able bodies person isn't working, it's because he doesn't want to work. I'm under no obligation to support street drug addicts merely because you cast them as victims. They are not victims. They are criminals.

Is prison expensive? Sure. I bet it doesn't have to cost that much to lock people up. But even if it does, locking people up is a much better use of public funds than endless and equally expensive homeless "services" that enable bad behavior.