Aren’t you just describing the modern prison system? I believe the fascism comes from doing it to non-criminals, or communism if you count china’s re-education camps. Also, the British invented concentration camps during the Boer war.

Work camps were a thing in the USA during the Great Depression. Supposedly a good thing, but I guess it depends on perspective.

I mean, the prison system in the US is its own humanitarian crisis.

Sure, but other prison systems that are more humane also concentrate people in locations.

Imagine America with a humane prison system that actually rehabilitated people rather than just grind them out at the end of their sentence. Then, we could send people with drug problems, or shop lifting or arson problems, to prison, and it would be a good thing for them rather than a bad thing. That might work.

And right now, there is a lot of crime going on in the drug addicted side of the homeless problem, we know prison is pointless so don’t even bother prosecuting these days unless it’s severe. However, it means that if we had the above, no other pretense would really be needed (crime -> enforced rehab).

This is all fantasy of course, because we have nothing like that in place. But it would be a good place to start (fix the correctional system).

> crime -> enforced rehab

Right, exactly. We concentrate people on what they do, not who they are. It’s harder to abuse the system that way (although it is abused still).

Right now the system is such that we try to be as specific as possible as to what is punishable by imprisonment and for how long, and the system results in imprisonment only if a jury is convinced beyond a reasonable doubt about the guilt of a defendant.

We can’t apply this same system to mental illness, for the reasons I stated in my other post. You see how it’s working in Florida; you tell everyone that you want to protect the children, write some vague laws to “protect” them, and then you use them to wage an ideological war against your political enemies, leveraging the vagueness of the laws you’ve passed. That’s the legal mechanism by which fascism works to corrupt democracy.

You see a lot of people eager to leverage the criminal system to get rid of homeless people by criminalizing homelessness on streets. This doesn’t work for them though, because it just drives homeless people into parks. That’s when you see the “well, let’s just ship them to the desert anyway” kind of ideas pop up. But there’s no legal mechanism to do so, I which is where the fascism comes in. “We will just label them as ‘undesireable’… I mean ‘mentally ill’ and that should be enough justification.”

I’m wondering how many of the people proposing such concentration camps are themselves diagnosed with a mental illness, and whether or not the absence of such a diagnosis may make them more likely to suggest such an idea.

Ya, if someone is on the street mentally ill, or even abusing drugs as a user, but not doing crime, there is no moral reason to force them into rehab. Frankly, that isn’t really common for the visible homeless in our area (the ones that we notice because they are walking around without a shirt on with a bunch of Amazon packages in their cart, that isn’t counting the homeless we don’t notice because they aren’t doing crazy things). The crime is pretty bad ATM, which is wearing out a lot of empathy, so even Seattle will be back in a tough on crime cycle in an election or two, not that it will do much good.

Criminalization of homeless on the streets is effective in eliminating the problem locally if a more permissive jurisdiction is nearby: eg you can’t lay down on a bench in Bellevue WA without swat coming out to talk to you, and so it’s easier to just go across the lake to Seattle where you can pitch a tent in a public park and maybe the police will get around to evicting you a few months later. No need to fund special buses, people will get to where they can live on their own.

Sending people from expensive places to live to cheap places to live is a good idea in theory, if it were just about affordability. The problem is that they’ve completely mis-identified the crisis, that people came to the rich cities because the rich cities had the tax base (and sympathetic voter base) to support services for them. Rather than talk about shipping people around, however, it might be time to introduce an internal residency system (give up on allowing free movement if we are going to insist on using local resources to solve these problems).