It is amazing that our nation could get social services or mental health care to people convicted of crimes faster than it does for people who are only guilty of being poor or from dysfunctional families. Still, I could see we might do it if it were to become to be seen as a matter of self-interest (which it also is).
Not really. People who have been arrested for crimes are conveniently located in concentrated locations where their lives can be carefully managed. The poor, on the other hand, are quite dispersed and have diverse lifestyles, making their problems much more complicated to address.
True: there are a lot of practical difficulties, not the least of which is the freedom to be non-compliant when you haven’t done anything to harm anyone else.
It’s definitely frustrating. Unfortunately, because these things are addressed so much in federal law now, the impossibility of a one-size-fits-all approach means that there’s always mountains of red tape to jump through. My mom doesn’t accept any government funding for her charity for this reason. The fact of the matter is that Glasgow, KY, has different problems and needs different solutions than downtown Baltimore. But because the feds control the flow of funding for antipoverty programs in the US, they have to jump through a million legal hoops to tailor their programs to their communities’ needs.
The concerning thing was the observation by Martha Stout that while something like 40% of those in prison were sociopaths or psychopaths, up to 1 in 25 of the non-incarcerated population is somewhere on that scale. This is many times higher than the populations of countries that do not teach a “how would you feel if someone did that to you” moralty (instead of “your family will be shamed and no one will associate you if you do that” morality that enforces social consequences on offenders).