Cruel or brilliant - City Offers Homeless One-Way leave if they never return

[iheartthed]

Originally Posted by Camelback

Then they get a bed, fed and medicine, isn't that better than sifting through garbage to maybe find and eat some leftovers full of maggots and bacteria?

If they wanted to go to jail they would just stab someone instead of going through all that trouble.

[biguc]

That's a hack article. Anglos love running with weird clickbait narratives about Europe. Something about pretending that social spending doesn't work and that everyone is secretly just as small-minded.

There's little coverage of this in Europe--or from reputable Anglo news sources. The most recent story is about how Basel has been housing homeless people in empty hotels. That's hardly a zero-tolerance policy. And there are border issues at play here that the article ignores--Switzerland is not EU but is Schengen, Romania is EU not not Schengen; Switzerland has no obligation to keep foreigners around. It's telling, given Europe's long and racist history with the Roma that 14 of 19 people to take the offer is going back to Romania. Anyway, it's nothing like dumping hick-town homeless off in the nearest big city.

[SFBruin]

I think that this is cruel. It is making somebody make a permanent decision for some immediate benefit.

[hauntedheadnc]

Originally Posted by SFBruin

I think that this is cruel. It is making somebody make a permanent decision for some immediate benefit.

If it makes you feel better, this phenomenon, "Greyhound therapy," is common enough in the US for it to get a mention in the courses when you're earning your BSW. However, in the US it's usually not permanent, provided you're willing to somehow make your way back across the country to where you started.

My husband used to work at the hospital in Asheville, which is where homeless people who are seeing demons -- and that's most of them -- end up, because the US does not have a functioning mental healthcare system. Asheville regularly received patients from Atlanta, Milwaukee, Charlotte, Raleigh-Durham, everywhere in Florida, and other places near and far. Most of the time all you have to do to get that free bus ticket is mention you think you might have some tenuous connection to a place, and the sending city will be happy to get rid of you. On occasion though, such as with the patients from Milwaukee, and a few shipments from Atlanta, the sending city just provided a group of people with tickets to get rid of them and shipped them off to some place they had no connection to whatsoever.

[SFBruin]

Originally Posted by hauntedheadnc

If it makes you feel better, this phenomenon, "Greyhound therapy," is common enough in the US for it to get a mention in the courses when you're earning your BSW.

It doesn't. Thanks for trying, though.