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Now, in principle, of course the "community" is a better place for the mentally ill than the hospital. But in practice, one is obliged to ask: What community?
Perhaps there once was a Rockwellian community ready to welcome its eccentrics. But in vast urban centers the mobility is dizzying, the competition fierce, and even the most stable can barely stand the stress. On Broadway's median strip, what can the idea of community possibly mean? Even the most tightly knit community has trouble keeping its marginal souls intact. It is inevitable that in the restless churning of urban life, people with severe mental impairments will be crushed and will fall, quite literally, by the wayside.
"In many places," says one mental patients' advocate, "it's worse than in the Middle Ages, when at least some communities cared for their mentally disabled and did not ostracize them." In Greenwich Village last winter, barbed wire was placed across hot-air grates to keep homeless people from sleeping in the neighborhood. Arson destroyed a shelter for the homeless in downtown San Diego. A Fort Lauderdale city commissioner suggested rat poison as a topping for local garbage.
These are detestable cruelties, but why the surprise? Tolerance for deviance is a high ideal. To base social policy on the assumption that the ideal exists is to invite catastrophe.
Interest in the catastrophe of others, however, is hard to sustain. But when one of the homeless mentally ill puts a bullet in one of us, we listen. For our own safety, we may soon be ready to lock these people away.
Yet the homeless mentally ill are hardly a major public safety threat. They do get arrested more often than others, but mostly for misdemeanors. They tend much more often to be the victims of crime than the perpetrators. The overwhelming majority are simply too crazy to be dangerous.
The danger posed by the homeless to society is more subtle. Sociologist James Q. Wilson has advanced the "broken-window theory": one broken window in a neighborhood is a kind of announcement that this is a place where care is not taken. And when order breaks down, everything else--vandalism, crime, ultimately total disintegration--follows.
The homeless--human litter in the streets--are a kind of broken social window announcing that suffering and chaos will be tolerated amid the most manicured lawns. Vagrants and panhandlers declare that the cycle of urban decay is under way. As formal controls break down, muggers move in, and stable families move out. "Arresting a single drunk or a single vagrant who has harmed no identifiable person seems unjust and in a sense it is," writes Wilson. "But failing to do anything about a score of drunks or a hundred vagrants may destroy an entire community."
There is one more reason people want the homeless carted away. People need to protect the mundanity of life. They cannot live with their feelings under challenge day in and day out. Living in the midst of the wretched homeless offends not just a community's sense of aesthetics but its moral sense. It is deeply disturbing to climb over an immobile body on the sidewalk. Most people, if on one occasion they see one person lying in the street, will rush to help. But if that person, and a dozen others, return night after night, only the saintly can be counted on not to lose heart.