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Federalist Radio Hour
‘The Kylee Cast’ feat. Devon Kurtz, Ep. 42: Helping Homeless People Is The New ‘Jim Crow’
00:57:26
On this episode of “The Kylee Cast,” Devon Kurtz, director of public safety policy at the Cicero Institute, joins Federalist Managing Editor Kylee Griswold to discuss a new homelessness bill in Louisiana that Democrats are smearing as — surprise,...
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- [00:00]
A
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B
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C
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C
Hi everybody and welcome to the Kylie cast. I'm Kylie Griswold, managing editor at the Federalist. Please like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss an episode. Leave us a five star review. It's one of the easiest and best ways you can help out the show. And even better yet, if you're just listening to the show, go check out the full video version on my personal YouTube channel or the Federalist channel on Rumble, and then of course, like and subscribe there too. If you'd like to email the show, you can do so at radio@the federalist.com I would love to hear from you today. I'm pleased to welcome to the show Devin Kurtz. He's the director of Public Safety Policy at the Cicero Institute, where he works specifically on the issue of homelessness. And today I get to talk to Devin about a new bill in Louisiana that is being decried by its critics as, surprise, surprise, the new Jim Crow. It's one of the left's favorite smears for policies they don't like. Today, Devin and I dive into the specifics of the bill, why it's absolutely not the new Jim Crow. And we also talk about how we can address the issue of homelessness across the country more broadly. So without further ado, please welcome to the show Devin Kurtz. Devin Kurtz, thanks so much for joining me today on the Kylie Cast.
- [02:14]
B
Thank you so much for having me.
- [02:15]
C
Yes, it's such a pleasure. I knew I wanted to invite you on the show as soon as I read the piece that you had in the Federalist, which we will get to in just a minute. But first, for our listeners who maybe aren't familiar with you, can you just start us off by telling us who you are, where you're from, and how you got into the work that you're
- [02:30]
B
doing now, happily so. I am the policy director focusing on public safety at the Cicero Institute, which is a think tank in Austin, Texas. I've been with Cicero since it started. It actually started in San Francisco, has some Silicon Valley roots, and our experiences there largely shaped my current work on homelessness. We're national in scope now. We work in more than 30 states, advising state lawmakers, advising federal agencies, the White House, and I live in Salt Lake City.
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C
Okay, excellent. So I first came across your work because of this article that you wrote for the Federalist that's specifically about a bill that is arising in Louisiana. And specifically what you wrote about is that the critics of this bill are calling it the new Jim Crow. They're calling it any number of names, actually, but Jim Crow seems to be their favorite preferred smear right now for policies they don't like. And so I'd love if you could just tell listeners, well, more broadly how. How else are critics framing this bill and then contrast that with what is actually in the bill? What would it actually do?
- [03:40]
B
Yeah, you know, I've been. I've been at this for. For quite a while now, and I'm used to smears. I will say that Jim Crow is a new one. We've gotten attention, camps, concentration camps. We've gotten all sorts of horrible things. Those were largely in reference to trying to create areas where people could camp safely, where there would be services and bathrooms and law enforcement, some basic order. Those were maligned quite similarly as detention camps. So Jim Crow is a new one, and it comes in response to a bill that has two components. One is that it regulates street sleeping and camping. What that looks like is essentially the same penalty for littering. We can think of littering and unregulated camping to be comparable offenses. They often involve a, you know, stuff that's being, you know, items, tents, sleeping bags, burners, trash. Oftentimes we see encampments swell with litter. I mean, there's cases in Austin of encampments being cleared with 600 tons of debris removed. So these big encampments really can create a lot of physical waste and contaminants. A lot of this is quite toxic to waterways. You could think about someone not being able to use a bathroom and actually using the bathroom out in a park that can have impacts on the soil, on waterways, et cetera. So it has a very similar impetus of why would we want to regulate street camping? For a very similar reason. Why we regulate anytime someone is bringing excess stuff and leaving it in a public space. So the penalties are roughly the same. There is more discretion on camping to impose other types of penalties beyond just a fine. But this other component is really where this Jim Crow malignant comes from. And it creates also a diversionary program. So whether someone is cited or has some other greater violation imposed through camping or for other crimes associated with a homeless offender. So a homeless person committing the crimes doesn't have to be just camping. It could be a variety of misdemeanors and even some low level felonies. They can, instead of being brought to jail or convicted, they can have access to a treatment court. So a judge can impose a sentence of treatment in lieu of the criminal justice penalty. And as part of that, they can be asked to complete community service. And that has been compared to forced labor. And that's where we get the Jim Crow label. So community service, something that is often also associated with littering or minor offenses, could be as simple as cleaning up the area that you have destroyed in your encampment or volunteering at a shelter that you're now staying in. Any of those things are being considered forced hard labor by, by critics of the Louisiana bill.
- [07:01]
C
Okay, there's so many directions I could go with this. The first thing that I was thinking, just as you're talking about, you know, the litter in these parks or whatever, because yes, there are so many contaminants, just all of the garbage and everything that accumulates, you know, it's really not fair to citizens of these communities that, that pay their tax dollars to have to have access to clean parks and, you know, clean benches and like these, these are things that they pay to be able to use. And, and I would imagine that these types of things also invite other crime. Even if not, you know, you think of just the broken windows theory of policing where, you know, if things are left to deteriorate, if you don't fix the small stuff, then bigger stuff, you know, it invites bigger crime. And so I would imagine that that's part of it. So the critics, I mean, is part of their issue the fact that this is a law enforcement thing like that, that the police are the ones dealing with this? You know, like, of course a judge can say, you know, this person needs to get mental health treatment or whatever. But, but are they complaining about the over policing element of is.
- [08:02]
B
And it's a, it's a flashpoint of a broader ideological debate. I'd say it's several ideologies or strains of ideology coming together. So you have. I would say the homeless activists themselves tend to be people who are steeped in homelessness policy. The main divide would be people who view homelessness as purely an economic issue, that irrespective of any other issues a homeless person might be struggling with, the fact is they are principally defined by their homelessness, and all homeless people share this one aspect. Thus they can all be addressed through fixing that one aspect. And I would say that that differs from my perspective, which is that actually there's many different subpopulations of the homeless. They're all homeless for different reasons. And if we want to properly get them out of homelessness as well as. As not just, you know, being a disordered person inside or a criminal inside, or a drug addict inside or mentally ill inside, but actually trying to address these underlying issues. We have to first identify what those issues are and then create interventions that. That meet them where they're at and understand that some people, principally those who are severely mentally ill, those in the criminal justice system, and those who are severely addicted to drugs, probably aren't going to have the urgency to help themselves because if they're either in a disordered state of mind or an addiction. So we have to intervene differently. But that's one. One flashpoint of the debate. You then do get the individuals who, I'd say are more focused on things like prison abolition, police abolition, the kind of usual radical takes on the criminal justice system. And this has sort of created an unholy alliance between the two, where they can attack it both for simply. Simply by the involvement of the criminal justice system, saying, oh, this is bad. But then also because they're framing the issue as one strictly of poverty, it seems misplaced. Now, what we often cite is take Louisiana. 18% of the people living on the street are convicted sex offenders. We're not criminalizing those individuals. They are already criminals. They have been convicted of some of the most serious crimes and are now living on the streets. If we were to broaden that out to felonies. I don't have precise data for Louisiana, but we can look at Utah, where I live, and where we've worked a lot on some policies that were also maligned similarly to the one in Louisiana, but that one was labeled a campus that was going to offer behavioral health treatment, was labeled the concentration camp in the New York Times last fall. Over in Utah, again, similar debate played out. Over three quarters of the thousand most arrested individuals in the state of Utah are homeless. That accounts for roughly half of the unsheltered population. So. And that. And then again, another third are convicted sex offenders there who are living on the street. So. And those. Some of those may also be in that most arrested category, but given the severity of their offenses, if they had been arrested, again, they probably would have been moved from the street. So we can speculate that that's actually maybe a separate population. So at this point, the remainder of the unsheltered population that's not either chronically being arrested or convicted sex offender is actually quite low. And so this argument that we're criminalizing it or that we shouldn't regulate these spaces, that there is no crime around homeless encampments, it's really. It doesn't bear out in the data. Mm.
- [11:40]
C
And if I'm not mistaken, a lot of the outcry over the complex in Utah was because of the civil commitment aspect of it, where, you know, yeah, people with mental. Severe mental illness would be committed, you know, regardless of their. Their willingness to participate in that. So break this down. You mentioned the percentage of sex offenders that. That is in this category. But for people who, like, don't live in the data like you do, if poverty is main driver of these things, you know, you mentioned poverty, severe mental illness, addiction, and crime as like, these main things. So if you're looking at a bar graph of, like, what. How does this break down? Is it pretty evenly divided or is there too much overlap in the reasons why people are homeless that you can't even really break it down? Or like, you know, is it. Is it fairly even across the board?
- [12:33]
B
Yes. So there is no one. One driver. And part of this is because we think of homelessness, again, as that binary of are you homeless or are you not? But there's actually a more important question. Are you a homeless person who is staying in a shelter and is actively engaged with services continually, or are you not? That binary is far more important because of the people who seek out shelter, comply with the rules of the shelter, engage with the case manager, and maybe receive some public support. Maybe they don't. They resolve their homelessness in about 45 days on average. It's rare for that. For that group to remain homeless. We would describe as chronically homeless, someone who's having many episodes of it and having them quite frequent. So those individuals, many of them self resolve, which, meaning they exit homelessness actually without government support. And then some number of them also are exiting with some kind of subsidized housing. And there's a couple ways that can come into play some of that if they could get a transitional housing unit which would have a bit more programmatic structure. They could get rapid rehousing, which is just a housing voucher for one to three years that they can then use to get back on their feet and stabilize. And then for those that have more severe disabilities, there's what's called permanent supportive housing, which is a longer term program to, to keep them permanently housed. What we've seen in Louisiana is that actually the homelessness has gone down over the last 10 years. And this is despite the, you know, LA has not been spared the increases in housing costs. People who often say this is a poverty or a housing crisis issue will point to rising housing costs and say that's what's causing homelessness. Well, actually what we see is homelessness has gone down in Louisiana. There was about 5200 people who were homeless in 2013 and in 2024, the latest data we have from HUD, that was about 3400. What hasn't changed is there were 1500 people living on the street then and there are 1550 people living on the street now. So the proportion who are living on the street has actually increased. Overall, the number has remained relatively stagnant. And those individuals who are, who are in the shelter system are resolving, they're exiting homelessness. That part of the system is working as it, the part that's failing despite massive increases from the federal government into different housing interventions are the people who are living on the street. That's where you get that very disordered population that is often a combination of mental illness, criminal justice involvement, both, both seriously and with kind of chronic misdemeanor offenses. Someone might never go on to commit very serious crimes, but they're committing dozens of petty thefts or car break ins or things like that. And then, and then you have the addiction issue. That's quite pervasive, I would say. There's, there's a remaining category of people who don't fall neatly in those other buckets, who, who have either broken a lot of the rules in shelters or are temperamentally quite difficult socially, whether that's with their family, with service providers, with shelters. And their issue is not necessarily one of say schizophrenia or meth addiction or crime, but they are still very hard to case manage because of some other non serious mental illness, but probably personality disorder.
- [16:09]
C
So in light of these statistics, the Louisiana bill makes perfect sense. That seems like the right approach to take because you're not talking about homeless people broadly, you're talking about camping specifically, you're talking about Unsheltered homeless people. So my question is, what do the critics who are calling this Jim Crow, the people who are against reforms like this, what do they propose instead? Like it just the status quo. Do they, do they deny that there's
- [16:34]
B
a one size fits all? Yeah, yeah, they say it's a one size fits all that. I mean, you get, you get a range of calls. The most famous book, I would say on the subject right now is Greg Colburn's Homelessness is a Housing Problem. And he essentially.
- [16:51]
C
It's a housing first approach.
- [16:52]
B
Yes, exactly. And he, I mean, he goes even further than. I mean, he does, he does give a plug for housing first, but he goes even further and essentially argues that we should decommodify housing, that the principal problem is that housing is an asset and that that is what capitalism is sort of at the root of this. And, and his solution is, you know, if you can systemically bring down housing costs. And he often proposes structural interventions that would be government subsidized housing, which is the core of Housing First. I would say they're generally agnostic on, on other ways that, you know, the markets could bring down housing. Like we've seen in Austin, like we've seen in Salt Lake, where simply building market rate housing has actually decreased housing costs. Unsurprisingly, we have not seen commensurate decreases in number of people living on the street when we just bring down housing costs. That does affect the number of people flowing into the shelter system. That does affect other pieces. But these are individuals who exist largely outside of that system, which to your point is, is why it's so important to have that regulation of camping as a way of, of moving people into services. And then, you know, the court system that is being designed in Louisiana within the same bill is to make sure that when that, when that sweep happens, that they are being moved into a system that can care for those underlying needs. So that's a very different, different model than one that is, that is solely looking at structural housing trends and, and seeing that only long term subsidized housing is the only solution. And the other piece of this is I'm not against some form of subsidized housing for, for many of these individuals who need it, what I am against is having no conditions for it. When you're asking someone, if you think of two people, you have one man who's living in an encampment and it does skew male. That's one of the other major divides, is that it's usually over 2/3 to 3/4 male living on the street. Women tend to be in the shelter system, especially women without any kind of drug addiction. They're gonna end up in the shelter system. So if you think of two people, one is a meth addict, which until the Trump administration changed this, that qualified as a disability that could earn you permanent housing under HUD policy. And then you imagine a woman who maybe has a kid and has some sort of physical disability, she would also be then eligible for this called permanent supportive housing. But because of the way that permanent supportive housing is structured, they could actually live next door to each other. And also until last summer, with the president's executive order, under HUD policy, that methodicted man could be a sex offender and could still be housed next to that family.
- [19:50]
C
Right.
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B
So you need to have much more intention about how we're structuring existing housing programs. Again, I'm not against having a housing program, but it needs to have expectations of conduct. You have expectations for treatment and where possible, move people to some level of independence.
- [20:09]
D
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- [20:42]
C
Yeah, not to get too philosophical, but what, what are the incentives for the housing first approach? I mean, is it mostly just more money? You know, is it about dollars? Is it about getting more tax dollars for these programs? Is it about undermining capitalism? Like, why, if these approaches are not working or they're not addressing the problem of camping, which is just appears to be the most persistent problem, then what are the incentives for people to continue to pursue these policies? Mostly dollars, I think.
- [21:13]
B
I, I mean, we've, my organization has been a harsh critic of a lot of these organizations. And we have, we've worked with several states on audits of the homelessness systems, and we do see some sketchy things. A colleague of mine, Paul Webster, sued the City of Los Angeles, City and County of Los Angeles over their homelessness policies. I mean, they lost a billion dollars. I mean, they couldn't account for, for any of the uses of those funds. I mean, there was Some really serious misconduct in Los Angeles.
- [21:47]
C
That's shocking.
- [21:47]
B
He's helped expose that. In some of these smaller states, there's not as many zeros, but we've still seen in Arizona instances of some of these nonprofits using public funds to give personal loans to their executives. We're doing some research now on executive pay for some of these NGOs and seeing how that compares to their overall proportion of funding and how in many communities this issue is getting worse. But I think that at a service provider level, the individual who's running one of these housing programs, part of the challenge is that they oftentimes they're a separate, separate organization from a shelter. They can be the same, but let's say they're a different organization. Their case managers are going out to the shelter, which again, as I said, skews different in terms of gender, excuse, very different in terms of level of disability, in terms of criminal, criminal background, etc. So they're dealing with really the easiest cases of homelessness because they're going to the shelter and they're getting them into housing. And those people are generally succeeding. We do see some level of failure. We also see some level of what I would describe as sort of an over prescription in that when we're giving someone permanent housing and by permanent, it's not just that they have a lease and an address that is a big piece of it, but it's also that the subsidy might never end. And we're giving someone that, that should be a pretty high bar. If you're going to have, you're going to keep someone on government dependence indefinitely, that should be a pretty high bar. And we don't always see that in the homelessness organization. So they're giving that to individuals that may not fully require it and they may not be pushing them, once they're a tenant, to move on out of that at an adequate pace. So there are challenges there. But, but we then think about they're, they're missing many of the hardest cases. That meth addicted sex offender who's living under the bridge. They're not interacting with as many of them or as frequently with them because they're harder cases to reach. They may not be under the bridge tomorrow. And outreach workers are the connective tissue as well as law enforcement between the services system and those individuals they have to go out and find. So, so their, their vision of homelessness is very different and their vision of the success of their system is very different. They think that if only everyone could get the, the because, because they see homelessness as a monolith, as solely an issue of poverty. If they could only get the man under the bridge, the same intervention they're getting the woman in the shelter, they see that as an equivalent need and an equivalent success from their intervention. But the activists know better. And the activists are the loudest voices. They're the ones who are calling this Jim Crow. It's not usually the service providers, not every service provider loves the reforms that we work on, but they generally are more amenable. The activists are a different group, and this is much more ideological. This is more of a critique of capitalism. This is more of a belief that only government subsidies can solve these things, that the government could abolish poverty, that poverty is a choice and usually in a distrust of the criminal justice system.
- [25:05]
C
Right, right.
- [25:06]
B
If these individuals are criminals, they're criminals because they're poor, because we've criminalized poverty and, and we have criminalized all of their. Their traumas rather than, you know, some sort of vague social services intervention that, by the way, the data does not show are particularly effective. But that. That's sort of this idealism around. Around what the government can provide to. To end poverty and end crime.
- [25:34]
C
So what do you think the relationship between law enforcement and homeless people should be like? You know, the law enforcement aspect is difficult because, as you say, there are so many different reasons why people are homeless. You know, somebody who is primarily a criminal, who is homeless is going to have different considerations than someone who is, you know, is suffering from a schizophrenic breakdown versus somebody who has a severe substance abuse problem. So, I mean, you know, how. How should these things work together? I tend to think that I don't know how it can be not a law enforcement problem. And yet at the same time, you know, it's such a multifaceted issue that, like, how. What. What should that relationship be?
- [26:21]
B
Sure. So I'll. I'll start with an acknowledgment that of homeless individuals who are in shelters. Law enforcement presence in a shelter keeps a shelter safe. A shelter should be a salvation. It should be a place where you can go to get that stability. When shelters are dangerous, which is something that we often hear, oh, that person lives in the park because the shelter is dangerous.
- [26:49]
C
Right.
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B
I then ask who made the shelter dangerous? Other homeless people. That's a failure of the system.
- [26:56]
C
Right.
- [26:57]
B
And a failure of the system to acknowledge that some homeless people make other homeless people unsafe. So that is a law enforcement issue. And this is especially true around drugs, around contraband you'll hear a lot about low barrier shelters, about shelters that allow drug use, allow drug paraphernalia. We've done a lot of work to ban that, to create what are called drug free homeless service zones, which is basically you take the drug free school zone policy and apply it to a shelter. And part of that is signaling why.
- [27:26]
C
I'm sorry, can you explain why, why this is such a problem in shelters? Like, is it just that people have such severe substance abuse problems that they, like, are viewed as being unable to function without, without these substances, or why is that a problem?
- [27:40]
B
It is, again, a, a misunderstanding of the needs of the individual. So, so like if we, if you
- [27:49]
C
have a shelter, then we can get them clean versus the other way around.
- [27:52]
B
Exactly. I, I've hear, I won't name the state, but I've heard discussions where a shelter system had a more proactive law enforcement presence. And it became the most sought after shelter in the city, and it became the safest shelter in the city. And the conversation among some of the service providers was, well, if this is being safe because we're turning certain people away because they might cause problems, then that's actually a failure. They would rather be able to serve this population that is making it unsafe and harder to serve other populations because there's such a high need there. And I, and I get that. But what we find is that when we create a safe environment, it actually allows people to move out faster, it frees up more space, it allows the system to flow better, and it creates a very clear message to those who are living on the street that we will meet you where you're at, but you have to meet us halfway. You have to be willing to comply with some basic order because it's not your right to make someone else feel unsafe. So law enforcement has a crucial role in the shelters of peacekeeping. When it comes to encampments, it has a crucial role there as well, because just as many homeless people. There's some good data from San Diego on this showing that homeless individuals were a few dozen times as likely to be, or more likely rather to be convicted of very serious crimes. Sorry, Sorry. To be victims of very serious crimes several dozen times. To be victims of serious crimes, and they were several hundred times as likely to commit them. What that shows us in both cases, though is that a lot of this is an overlapping population, that most crime is being committed by homeless people towards homeless people. And a homeless person who's committing a crime today may be a victim of a crime tomorrow. So there's just a ton of antagonistic activity happening in these unregulated spaces. And this idea that an encampment is somehow safer than a shelter is ridiculous. It is not worn out in the data. I've written extensively about this and, and moreover really romanticizes this, the independence that's associated with living in an encampment. These individuals are not choosing to live there. Oftentimes they've been kicked out of shelters because of their, their bad behavior or they may be a convicted sex offender or they, they may be out there because they are either being preyed upon by drug dealers or dealing drugs themselves or some combination of both. The sex trafficking that occurs in these, in these encampments is quite high. You know, as I said, most women are in shelters. If you're a woman in this, in one of these encampments, rates of sexual violence, rates of sexual trafficking very, very high. I won't name the state again, but, but there was one law enforcement officer that we worked with very closely who talked about, you know, clearing an encampment and finding a 12 year old girl who had run away from her parents in one of these, one of these tents. She was being trafficked and you know, she had been addicted to drugs at a very young age and was living with her drug dealer. And you know, that that's an unacceptable reality. We, we have, we have to do far more about that. So law enforcement must be at the table. But it's as much to save that little girl as it is to punish the, the one who is preying upon her.
- [31:37]
C
Right, right. Yeah. I, the, the emphasis on independence too, not to veer too philosophical again, but it's just seems to be like a misunderstanding of what independence and freedom are and what they're for as well. You know, we, we don't, Freedom is not just this libertine idea of just being able to, you know, do whatever you want. Because these people are in no sense independent or free like they are slaves to substances or to, you know, their decisions or whatever. That's not, that's not independence. That's a really, really very enslaved way of living actually. And whether you're in a shelter or on a park bench does not dictate whether you are free or not. So. And in fact, you know, you might have a lot more freedom by submitting yourself to somebody who's going to help you than thinking that you're freer by, by doing it on your own, but actually being a slave to, to the way that you're living and just kind of a Different, different way of thinking about it. So switching gears just a little bit, because you brought up the Trump executive order a little while ago and I did want to touch on that. I think it was over this past summer, July maybe, that that was issued. Can you just refresh our memories for people who maybe weren't as tuned into that at the time? What did the executive order include and how is that affecting what states are doing? How does Louisiana's bill specifically accomplish these goals? Like, like what all was involved, included in that, in that order?
- [33:10]
B
Yeah. So this, this is a July executive order from the White House that is a major, major development from pretty much the Obama administration on. We saw a continuity of homelessness policies under what we described earlier is called Housing first. And that was a philosophy that, as I said, homelessness is a housing problem, that it can be best addressed through the provision of government subsidized housing, and that that housing should have as few or no strings attached as possible. There should be no expectation of any kind of compliance with services treatment. And because the individuals are given a lease, there's actually very little that can be done to enforce certain kind of conduct. So it's a very, very hands off approach. And this, this managed to survive. The first Trump administration, there was a great degree, a great degree of skepticism of it. And when, when Secretary Carson was in charge of HUD and they began the process of reviewing it, it's one of those things where frankly, there's not a huge bench of conservative talent looking at homelessness. So when a Republican takes over there, there was not a ready guard of individuals to, to start to take on this issue. And its worst manifestations in California had only just started to be realized. So we then get to the second Trump administration and this is a pretty early priority in large part because so many states had been already quite active on the issue and trying to move around the federal government's restrictions under the Biden years over trying to move away from housing first and trying to do things like Louisiana's doing in terms of regulating street camping, which under the Biden funding rules, the nonprofits who receive federal funds could actually receive bonuses in their point scores if they advocated against policies like we're seeing in Louisiana. It was actually taxpayer funded activism.
- [35:27]
C
Okay.
- [35:28]
B
And so all of the, there was all of these different challenges that needed to be removed. And this executive order focused primarily on the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and trying to, you know, directing them to remove these bad incentives, such as advocating against these policies and instead creating incentives for them. To. To promote them. Then you had, as well as ending the. The housing first mandate and ending this. This. This huge incentivization of housing first and allowing states to experiment with different approaches and be incentivized to do so. Then there was the Department of Justice and the Department of Health and Human Services, which were both directed to take a closer look at things like serious mental illness and addiction and civil commitment. And our responses to those looking at practices like harm reduction, which. Which is, you know, sort of at best the distribution of naloxone, which can reverse an opioid overdose, and at worst is the distribution of clean crack pipes in Kensington and Philadelphia and this. This and, you know, tacit endorsement of. Of substance abuse. So they're reviewing that, and they've been very nuanced about. About harm reduction. They've. They've continued. The administration's continued to. To support common sense things like Narcan and roll back as recently as two weeks ago, policies or programs like fentanyl test strips, which at first sound quite good, but when you look at it, actually don't really save lives and actually can create problems because some individuals will use them to find fentanyl to use rather than trying to avoid it. So some of these issues are quite nuanced. And it doesn't ban it. It just doesn't allow a small pool of federal funds to be used for it. States are still free to experiment. All of the executive order applies to federal funding.
- [37:27]
C
Mm. Mm. Okay, so let's rewind because I think, you know, we have. We've looked at the recent past of, like, the Biden era, the Obama era, the housing first, but this problem, I think, goes back a lot longer ago than that. Can we just talk a little bit about how we got here and maybe, like, the role of deinstitutionalization in this? Do you think that that's overblown? Like, is that. Was that not the main driver? Yeah. How did. How did we get here? How did this problem get so out of control?
- [37:57]
B
So I've spent a lot of time thinking about institutions, psychiatric institutions and their evolution. I'm working on a piece on it right now that traces that history back to the very first one in Virginia, the very first public psychiatric hospital. And if you read the. The notes from the Colonial governor to the. To the House of Burgesses, you. You see a very similar description to what we experience today, that there are these individuals who are clearly unwell, who are wandering the countryside and ending up in our jails. And. And there's this this moral outcry to do better for them. And, and I really see that as the crux here. And this is why to go back to Louisiana. It's why, yes, there's a criminal justice intervention, but that's really to create the lever to get someone treatment. The goal is not to jail people. The goal is to get them into drug treatment and behavioral health treatment. Unfortunately, because of the process of deinstitutionalization, we have to rely on the criminal justice system. Because we used to have a civil system that is now very, very narrow. So the main difference, if we go back 75 years to the mid century, we had a system where an individual with mental illness could be treated before they become dangerous and before they've committed a crime. And they could. A physician, in concert with oftentimes family members could diagnose someone and see that they are deteriorating psychologically and need some amount of involuntary treatment, largely because they're unable to recognize their illness. That's one of the main symptoms of schizophrenia, is detachment from reality. Without realizing that detachment from reality, There was a system in which we could intervene preemptively. Most people didn't stay in these institutions indefinitely. I think that that's kind of a myth. There were definitely some who were long term patients, but there were many who were stabilized and then released. When we closed a lot of these institutions, it was done in a couple of ways. There were some natural pressures that there was actually a change in need because of developments in science. One of the ones that we don't talk about a lot is penicillin. Penicillin cannot cure schizophrenia, but it can cure tertiary syphilis. And syphilis used to be one of the most common and debilitating diseases. Penicillin was the first drug that could respond to its most severe form, which created neurological damage. So if you had syphilis for over a decade, you would have the symptoms of. Of schizophrenia or dementia. And there was actually no earlier ways. In 1910, there were earlier treatments for early stages of syphilis which, which prevented more people from. From developing into severe syphilis. But it wasn't until the late 1940s that with wide access of penicillin that we were able to actually treat that most severe form. This constituted between 10 and 20% of admissions to asylums.
- [41:29]
C
Wow.
- [41:29]
B
So, I mean, it's. It's a huge portion that, that basically end of World War II, that population no longer needs to be treated there. They can be treated with antibiotics.
- [41:38]
C
Right.
- [41:39]
B
So, so then you get more treatments actually for, for Psychiatric disorders. You get basically antipsychotic medication. And that's where we start to see that some people can be treated in the community. But most of the research emerging from that time indicated that the rate of rehospitalization was quite high. So it wasn't actually, as there was some sort of this. What I would describe as pharmaceutical optimism around, and I would even say idealism around these medications. And we sort of jumped the gun in closing too many beds too fast and narrowing who could be treated in that environment. And really, by the 1990s, we see a pretty substantial decrease in the scale at which we're using these facilities. And you go back to Peter Rossi and some of the. The early ethnographies of. Of homelessness in America, Skid Row, some of these great ethnographic texts, they're talking about seeing mentally ill people on the street, which is very different from what it was 25 years ago. This is a new population that's emerging onto the street. And it's not so much that all of them were in institutions. It's that had we had different eligibility and capacity, they would have been in them. So it's, you know, you can see the. It often is on social media, the map of deinstitutionalization and the rise of mass incarceration. And it is not an entirely accurate chart, in part because it's often not the same individuals. There was some turnover. The average life expectancy of people with severe mental illness is less than 60. So a lot of these individuals were different, but they would have, at a different time, been treated in the civil system. By the time we get really to the. To the. To the 70s, 80s, and then. And then, especially after the Americans with Disabilities act of the 90s, we basically have no. No way to treat an individual, even in the civil system, until they've committed a crime. And then it's pretty much a coin toss whether or not they're going to end up in prison or in a psychiatric hospital or both.
- [43:56]
C
Right, Right. So how do the shelters like we're talking about in Louisiana, how do they compare to the institutions of the 1940s or the 19? Yeah, I guess deinstitutionalization started in the 50s. Correct. So prior to that, how do they compare?
- [44:11]
B
So. So I think there's. There are some shelters that are focused on homeless individuals with mental illness. That's not the majority. Okay. I would say that there is a pretty substantial challenge. What we see typically is a disproportionate number of homeless individuals with severe Mental illness live outside. And that rate has been increasing. It hasn't been increasing as fast as other states in Louisiana, but here in Utah, the mentally ill, unsheltered homeless has increased by about 5x so in the last 10 years. So we see nationwide a huge growth in both the number of mentally ill individuals who are living outside, not in shelters, but also a higher proportion of mentally ill homeless people who are not in shelters. And what that signals to me is that the shelter system is not equipped as it's currently. And this is, this goes back to that, to that low barrier approach that has, just as there was a low barrier approach for housing that came in tandem with a push to be low barrier and shelter. And you can think about, if you're an individual with severe mental illness, you may have a hard time in an environment that's unregulated, both because you may be more prone to act out, and you may also be more likely to be a victim of someone else acting out if the shelter is less safe. The most likely people to be victimized are those with severe mental illness. So it goes, it goes hand in hand that a less safe environment hurts the most vulnerable. This is a very vulnerable population and they're largely unable to take advantage of the existing shelter system. And others are able to be exiting and this population is stubbornly not. We see there's some interplay with addiction. I think that's another big difference between the mid century and now is that because people with serious mental illness are in the community, in these unregulated environments, they're far more likely to be preyed upon for especially methamphetamine. And long term methamphetamine usage has such deleterious effects on the brain that it actually can present as schizophrenia and it actually can develop into schizophrenia. So it's this really complex mess of substance abuse victimization, severe mental illness, that frankly, if you look at any state hospital in America, the few psychiatric beds that we have left, any of those environments is going to be better staffed than a shelter or one of these housing complexes, certainly better than a encampment, far safer. And really the, the only abuses that the federal watchdogs can find in these institutions is patients victimizing other patients because the hospital can't medicate the individuals properly because of the same federal watchdogs, the civil liberties watchdogs in these hospitals will sue a hospital for having one patient attack another patient and not adequately protecting their patients. But then they will turn around and sue them again if they try to medicate the offender so that they don't act out and abuse other patients. So they're in a bind. These hospitals are really in a bind under our current system. This is one of the things that the executive order directs the Department of Justice and Health and Human Services to look at because so much of the restriction on the state hospitals has been placed upon them by the federal government.
- [48:01]
C
So before I let you go, I want to just touch on states for a little bit outside of Louisiana. There was a piece this week, I forget if it was on his substack or in the Federalist, but by Chris Bray, who is a Californian, and it was just, just a classic example of California disorder, especially as it relates to substance abuse and homelessness. He was in one of the, one of the big parks in Los Angeles. I forget the name because I'm not an Angeleno, but basically that, I think it was the mayor, Karen Bass, who posted a notice that ice would not be tolerated in this park because this park was only going to be used for its lawful intent. And in the background behind this sign are just people passed out, completely unconscious, you know, in, in pools of their own vomit and other excrement and just, you know, totally, totally incapacitated and homeless. So, you know, the implication being, yes, the lawful intent of this park is clearly for people to be camping here and do it be, you know, being very unwell. But anyway, so California is on that end of the spectrum. But then you have states like Louisiana and Utah that are taking, that are making efforts to reverse some of these bad trends. I would just love to know from your point of view, the research that you've done, what, what states have the best approach to the homelessness crisis and what can other states learn from them and start to implement?
- [49:28]
B
Yeah, I, I, the, the story from California resonates with me again. I lived in San Francisco in the late 2000 teens and saw really some of the wreckage of not just the federal housing first policies, but of California doubling, tripling down on bad ideas. I was there under a DA that would rather prosecute cops than criminals. And I, as you said, I mean, I do think that to give a glimmer of hope in California, I've been back in San Francisco a few times under their new mayor. And I will say things are not perfect. It's still California, but they're trying. And, and, and I can't. This is not a problem that can be solved overnight. It's not a problem that's going to be solved as simply as passing HB211. In Louisiana, it's a stubborn issue that requires work day in and day out from service providers, from law enforcement, from. From policymakers who will have the backs of their residents and of the homeless people who are suffering. It is not compassionate to let someone lay in a park, you know, strung out and. And delirious and throwing up.
- [50:43]
C
That.
- [50:43]
B
That is not good for them either.
- [50:46]
C
So, again, that's not what freedom looks like. That's not what independence looks like.
- [50:49]
B
Right, exactly. And. And they also. You can't in good conscious, wait for them to. To come out of this and say, now I'm ready for help. That, to me, only further emphasizes that addiction is a moral failing or mental illness is a moral failing. If we're saying they have to choose to come out of it, then we're implying that they're choosing to stay in it. And I don't fully accept that so often. That's why we need that push. And I think the mayor of San Francisco is trying to do that, and I have some hope there. We see Matt Mahann down in San Jose. He's running for governor in California. He's doing the same thing. So it's not a solely partisan issue. Like, I'm going to now go and pivot to some red states, but there are some blue city mayors who see the writing on the wall, see their communities dying, see their neighbors dying on the street, and want to do the right thing and are starting to. California has a long way to go. There's a lot of headwinds, but they're trying. Some of them are trying. Turning to Utah, which has been highlighted in the New York Times several times as a national leader and as the state that rose its hand the fastest and the most effectiveness to implement the president's executive order and have been doing really great work on it for several years. What's unique here is that we also have this. Despite the polemics of the New York Times article from last fall on the homelessness campus, there actually is a lot of cooperation between the mayor of Salt Lake City, the mayor of Salt Lake county, both Democrats, and the police chief who used to lead the Department of Corrections in the Cox administration. So he's a, you know, has been a Republican, senior Republican official, and, And. And then the Cox administration itself. Representative Clancy, who was a longtime legislator working on this, is now the state's homelessness coordinator. And what you see is a very pragmatic approach. There was unanimity in support for camping vans, and there was, again, unanimity and support for. Not for the campus but for building several smaller residential treatment sites. So there's, it can be done without the controversy we see in Louisiana. And, and what it really looks like is, is leaders coming together and hammering out proposals that are reasonable, that, that have a compassionate framing, but also understand that accountability is, is key to, to showing compassion to a group of people who are, who are a danger to themselves and their communities or who are just, just unable to get out of this themselves and need that helping hand. So they're moving in a great direction. We don't see the same level of refusal to enforce. If there's an encampment at the Jordan River Trail, the police department is dealing with that. Within this last year, there's now if an individual is arrested for breaking drug laws in a park, a judge can now order a no trespass order for them on that park before they're even convicted. So that they can, there could be a temporary period where that individual is no longer disrupting that park so that families can come back. And this was a big issue we saw in Salt Lake. Very family oriented community like the state of Utah. Denying families access to parks because of individuals using drugs is just sort of a non starter here. So it lasted a very short period of time and we do see a groundswell of support around those efforts. It's a unique place politically, but we do see other states following suit. I expect to see Texas be a leader on this. Florida, they've both taken action on, on similar policies to what we're seeing in Louisiana, but they're not done. They're going to keep, keep working at it and they have some buy in from cities like Miami, cities like Austin that, that have, have come around on this, this idea that we really do need to intervene. Miami has had historically a lot of success with the very kind of program that Louisiana is proposing. Judge Leifman, who has worked very closely with Salt Lake county to try to develop a diversion program for homeless individuals. If you were to look at that framework, I would argue that it is very similar to the Louisiana bill. It may even be, you know, a more aggressive form of what is going on in Louisiana. So oftentimes the, where the activists want to focus their attention and criticism, it depends on the day, but I've been surprised to see policies that were hailed as meaningful reform in Salt Lake county and in Miami be compared to slavery and Jim Crow in Louisiana.
- [56:18]
C
Mm. We really shouldn't be surprised by any of this anymore. But anyway, yes, Devin, this is clearly a very multifaceted issue. You're doing such great work on it. Thank you for all of your work on it. For people who want to dive more into into these numbers, learn more about this issue, where can they find more more of your writing?
- [56:36]
B
Definitely. You know, check us out at the cicero institute.org, our website. I write pretty regularly for City Journal over at the Manhattan Institute. I've been on NPR quite a bit about particularly the Utah Project. But there's also a debate with me and Dennis Kulhane, a professor at UPENN who's one of the chief architects of housing first from Philly Public Radio. So there's a lot of good content out there.
- [57:03]
C
Awesome. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for sharing your expertise on this with us today. Really appreciate it.
- [57:09]
B
Of course. Thank you so much for having me.
- [57:16]
C
Thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode of the Kylie Cast. If you haven't done so already, please like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We have a channel specifically for the Kylie Cast on Spotify and Apple podcasts. So if you are only subscribed to the Federalist Radio Hour or you're wrong with Molly Hemingway and David Harsanyi, two of our other great Federalist podcasts Cast, be sure that you're also subscribed to the Kylie Cast so you never miss an episode and then leave us a five star review. It's such an easy way for you to help out the show. So what's stopping you? As always, I will be back next week with more. So until then, just remember the truth hurts, but it won't kill you.
- [58:04]
B
Sa.