The Asylum Is the Shelter Now

I lasted seven days in a men’s shelter. The tent in the woods was the upgrade.

There is a man burned into my memory forever, and I met him in a shelter bathroom at six in the morning.

I was getting ready for work. He was standing at the sink wearing nothing but a pair of stained tighty whities, holding two sets of tweezers. He had dug a hole into his own face roughly the size of a dime. He was using one pair of tweezers to hold the hole open and the other pair to dig around inside it.

I asked him if he was okay. There is no correct thing to say in this situation. Emily Post died without ever addressing it.

He told me he had to get the worms out of his face before they ate his brain.

I said, “Well, obviously.”

Then he pointed the tweezers at me and explained, in terms I will not repeat here (some of you are eating), what I was going to do for him or else he was going to stab me. So I punched him in the face as hard as I could, walked out of that bathroom, went to work my shift, and on the way home I stopped at a sporting goods store and bought a tent and a propane heater. I spent the next two months camping in the woods next to a waterfall, in winter, until I saved enough for an apartment.

The tent, in the woods, next to a frozen waterfall, in a winter that meant it, was the UPGRADE.

That man did not need a cot in a homeless shelter. He needed a locked psychiatric ward, medication, and doctors. What he got instead was me, a guy who had lost his job three weeks earlier, standing between him and the sink. Because in America, I am the mental health system now. So are you.

How a Guy With a Job Ends Up in a Shelter

It went like this. I lost my job with no warning, right before rent was due, with no savings. If you have never lived paycheck to paycheck, that sentence sounds like a personal failure. If you have, you know it is a Tuesday. Roughly a third of this country is one missed paycheck from the exact same cliff, and the cliff does not care how hard you worked.

So I did what you are supposed to do. I swallowed my pride and went to the safety net. And I found out what millions of men find out every year, which is that if you are a single man with no children, the safety net is a rumor.

Cash assistance? TANF stands for Temporary Assistance for Needy Families. Families. No kids, no check. Section 8 housing? The waitlists in most cities are closed, and when they open, they run lotteries (an actual lottery, like Powerball, except the jackpot is an apartment and the odds are worse) with preference categories for families, the elderly, and the disabled. A healthy single man is at the bottom of a list that is measured in years. Food stamps? Able-bodied adults without dependents get three months of benefits out of every three years unless they can document steady work hours, which is a fascinating requirement to impose on a man whose entire problem is that he just lost his work hours. Most states killed their general assistance programs decades ago.

So here is what every caseworker knows and no politician will say into a microphone. If you are a single white male in this country, there is no program for you. There is no office, no caseworker, no line to stand in. You are the demographic America has collectively agreed can eat dirt. The system looked at me, a sober guy with a work history whose only crime was an empty bank account on rent day, and offered me exactly one thing.

A cot in the shelter.

The Flophouse

The men’s shelter system, as sold to the public, is a trampoline. Good person hits bad luck, shelter catches him, bounces him back into housing. That is the brochure. Donors love the brochure.

The reality is a flophouse. The bathroom was a shooting gallery. Guys got high in the stalls all night. Belongings disappeared. Half the beds were occupied by men who were not down on their luck, they were profoundly, visibly, untreated mentally ill, hearing voices, screaming at walls, or excavating their own faces with grooming implements at dawn.

And scattered among them, the people the shelter was actually built for. The laid-off guy. The man whose marriage collapsed. The kid aged out of foster care. Men who needed six weeks and a mailing address, trying to sleep with one eye open in a warehouse of untreated psychosis and open drug use.

I lasted a week. Then the tweezers, then the tent. And every city planner in America wringing their hands about why the parks are full of tents should understand this. The tents are not full of people who could not find a shelter bed. They are full of people who found one.

Where the Asylums Went

At this point you may suspect I am constructing a national policy argument on top of one guy with tweezers. Fair. Let’s check the numbers.

In 1955, America’s state psychiatric hospitals held about 558,000 patients. Today, state hospitals have fewer than 40,000 beds, in a country whose population has doubled. Per capita, we eliminated more than ninety percent of our public psychiatric capacity. Poof. Gone.

The sales pitch was compassion. In 1963, JFK signed the Community Mental Health Act, promising that patients released from the big state hospitals would be caught by a national network of community mental health centers. Then Washington built roughly half the centers, funded them like an afterthought, and every administration since has treated the whole project like a gym membership in February. The hospitals closed on schedule. The replacement never showed up.

So where did half a million severely mentally ill people go? They did not evaporate. They went to two places.

They went to jail. Today the three largest mental health providers in the United States are the Los Angeles County Jail, the Cook County Jail, and Rikers Island.

Not hospitals. Jails. There are roughly ten times more people with serious mental illness sitting in American jails and prisons than in the state hospitals we built specifically to treat them. In 1955 we had half a million psychiatric beds and about 200,000 prisoners. Today we have two million prisoners and almost no psychiatric beds. That is not two trends. That is one transfer.

And they went to the shelters and the streets, which is where the ones who have not committed a jailable offense yet wait their turn.

Why did it happen this way? Follow the money, because the money always knows. The money did not disappear. Prisons cost taxpayers more per man than the hospitals ever did. The difference is the destination. A state hospital dollar paid doctors, nurses, orderlies, and cooks, public employees who spent it back into their own towns. It circulated. A prison dollar gets skimmed on the way through.

CoreCivic and GEO Group pull in around four billion dollars a year between them warehousing human beings for the government. Then there are the phone companies charging inmates a dollar a minute to call their mothers, the commissary vendors, the food service giants, the private medical contractors, the whole remora school of third parties feeding on a per-diem bed rate. Same taxpayer, same bill, except now it terminates in the pockets of contractor executives instead of the community.

And who owns the contractors? Donors, lobbyists, and friends of the same legislators who wrote the laws that closed the hospitals and filled the cells. The system was not dismantled because it failed. It was dismantled because it was not a profit engine, and it was replaced with one whose owners had the senators on speed dial. There is a word for arranging public policy so that public money flows to your friends. We call it corruption when other countries do it. Here we call it procurement.

The politicians who closed the asylums got to call themselves humanitarians. The contractors who built the prisons got to call themselves job creators. And the man with the tweezers got a cot next to mine.

The People I Feel For

Before the comment section warms up its pitchforks, let me aim this correctly. I am not angry at the man in the bathroom. He is a victim of this too, maybe the biggest one. Somewhere there is a version of his life where he got committed, medicated, and stabilized, and instead he was performing surgery on himself in a shelter sink because the institution that should have held him was sold for parts. Punching him in the face remains one of the sadder things I have ever had to do, and I do not apologize for it either. The shelter system hands you a lot of sentences like that one.

The people I really grieve for are the normal homeless. That phrase will get me yelled at, and I do not care, because everyone who has been inside the system knows exactly what I mean. The guy with the layoff. The woman fleeing a bad man. People whose only pathology is bad luck, who need a short runway and instead get processed into a building that functions as an unlocked, unstaffed, unmedicated asylum, and then get blamed for refusing to stay there.

We took three separate problems, mental illness, addiction, and poverty, and stuffed them into one building, and now we act surprised that the building solves none of them. The sick get no treatment. The addicted get a private bathroom stall. And the merely broke get robbed, threatened, and traumatized until they conclude, rationally, that a propane heater and a waterfall are a better social program than anything their government offers.

They are right. I know, because that heater and that tent did more for me than every agency in my city combined. I got off the street on the strength of a factory job and camping equipment. Total government contribution to my recovery, zero dollars and zero cents.

Rebuild the hospitals. Real psychiatric capacity, with real doctors and yes, the ability to hold people who are digging holes in their own faces, because letting a man do that at a public sink is not freedom, it is abandonment with better PR. Get the sick into treatment, get the addicted into recovery beds, and give the shelters back to the people they were built for. Nothing here needs to be invented. We ran this system for a century. We stopped because it was less profitable than a prison, and in America that has been reason enough ever since.

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One last thing, and I mean this from the bottom of my formerly frostbitten heart. To my paid subscribers, thank you. You people are the reason I do not lie awake anymore doing rent math at 3 a.m. You are the reason I will never spend another night in one of those horrible shelters or another winter in a freezing tent in the woods, and there is no way to properly explain what that kind of security means to a man who has furnished a residence at a sporting goods store. You did that. If you are not a paid subscriber yet and this story hit you anywhere, consider becoming one. Every subscription keeps this outlet independent, keeps Lily paid for making my sentences legal, and keeps the propane heater retired where it belongs, in the closet, as a trophy.

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