> What would you do with a naked guy who hasn't showered in 3 weeks walking around the library with a piece of glass in his hand threatening to potentially cut someone?
What would I do in one hypothetical case that you invented, with no other details about the situation and person? I don't know. Is that really the question you're interested in here?
What I think is that as soon as a situation becomes really bad, it's likely already too late. There's no magical solution, certainly not jail. The jail proponents often say "We shouldn't tolerate this behavior", but we don't tolerate murder, for example — we arrest and jail murderers — yet murder continues to be a problem, for which jail has demonstrably not been a solution. You might ask, "What then should we do with a murderer?", and we could talk about that at length, but I don't think the answer to that question would actually be a solution to prevent murder. We have to look at the conditions that result in increased murder rates, and do what we can to prevent those conditions from arising in the first place. And the question here, relevant to the linked article, is why do homeless people end up at libraries? It's because they have nowhere else to go. What we do with the homeless once they end up at libraries is already missing the point, in my opinion. Jail is not a solution, it's at best a bandage for a gaping wound.
What would I do in one hypothetical case that you invented, with no other details about the situation and person? I don't know. Is that really the question you're interested in here?
What I think is that as soon as a situation becomes really bad, it's likely already too late. There's no magical solution, certainly not jail. The jail proponents often say "We shouldn't tolerate this behavior", but we don't tolerate murder, for example — we arrest and jail murderers — yet murder continues to be a problem, for which jail has demonstrably not been a solution. You might ask, "What then should we do with a murderer?", and we could talk about that at length, but I don't think the answer to that question would actually be a solution to prevent murder. We have to look at the conditions that result in increased murder rates, and do what we can to prevent those conditions from arising in the first place. And the question here, relevant to the linked article, is why do homeless people end up at libraries? It's because they have nowhere else to go. What we do with the homeless once they end up at libraries is already missing the point, in my opinion. Jail is not a solution, it's at best a bandage for a gaping wound.