Yes, there are many compounding and interrelated bad things involved in all of this stuff.

It is very strange, if you remove yourself from the context of current day Burgerland, that people who commit crimes (minus a very select few crimes that reactionaries will point to as the rule rather than the exception- talking about SA, child abuse, etc.), “do their time,” are still punished further… and it’s fully legal to do so. You’d think there would be a fully encompassing anti-discrimination standard set like “You can’t just not hire people because of arbitrary bullshit reasons like them getting hit with a burglary charge” (even assuming they did it. I don’t give a shit).

And I know people, reactionaries/right wingers, always go “ohhhhh but uhhhhh rapists?” Yeah, dumbfucks, certain, specific violent crimes should bar people from certain careers. They just take the exception and try to apply it broadly. Also, probably unpopular opinion (absolutely unpopular in broad American culture), but even if someone committed a violent crime like rape or murder, if they “did their time” and actually were rehabilitated (ahh… there’s the problem in US prisons…) then they should be integrated into society back to some level of normalcy. Even I have some hangups on what exactly that entails, etc. but my idealistic view is most people can be rehabilitated and at the very least society owes everyone the effort to try to rehabilitate people. It will fail sometimes, but it would be incredibly vastly better and more humane if we actually tried.

But we can’t even convince people to stop thinking cops rounding up homeless people fixes anything or that providing homes and basics for life should be guaranteed to everyone… without bullshit conditions like “not using recreational drugs.” I’d rather someone have a home to shoot heroin rather than doing it on the street or in crack dens and such where people are being assaulted and murdered constantly. That’s the frustrating part of Burger-brain in the end is… do you actually want to stop seeing the heroin addicts everywhere? I do. And killing them or shooing them away will never solve the issue permanently. Give people purpose, stop labeling people for life based on stuff they did very young or stuff they did at their lowest points, support them, and see what happens.

All of this just feels like a pipe dream in Burgertown USA. People literally scoff and laugh if you say the solution to most of the homeless and addiction epidemic, or at least the way to alleviate the worst symptoms, is free housing for everyone with zero conditions. As a human right. Some of the reactionary tendencies towards addiction has lessened in the last 10 years or so since now addiction is a plague in white communities (as opposed to crack epidemic which mainly hit black communities). But still, people have a nearly violent reaction to the mere suggestion that throwing someone in prison for using heroin is bad/not solving anything. Or (and this is fucking impossible to convince them) that piling on ten billion charges of burglary and theft because someone stole to feed an addiction is absolutely not “holding them accountable” it’s just destroying their already zero chance of ever recovering. Now they’re doing hard time. What the fuck do they think a heroin addict that gets hit with years of time for burglaries does when they finally get out?