Now that Claudine Gay is out as Harvard's president on evidence that
she plagiarized research and failed to counter antisemitism on campus,
Harvard's elites are steaming with fury. They had, after all, signed a letter urging that the university keep her and her wokester policies on board. But that wasn't the worst of it. The
biggest indignity was in the knowledge of who took her down:
Not a top
Harvard scholar but a lowly Harvard night school student with the
equivalent of a master's degree named Christopher Rufo, writing on his
humble Substack. He was the one who found the plagiarism. And here's a Harvard professor who let the cat out of the bag:..............somehow, the traditional students are not just 'better,' they are also more believable......
It turns out Rufo has a degree from Harvard, a night school degree, but according to this nitwit professor, "they are not the same as what we normally think of as Harvard graduate students". Really? In some way this contemptible academic thinks denigrating these hard
working "night students'.....a blanket condemnation mind you..... is an
acceptable and intelligent tactic in defense of an incompetent, corrupt
academic. Another over educated, over pampered, over catered to, and under smart Ph.D. How stupid can she be? And that opens up a can of worms. We'll come back to that.
These nitwits are consistent though. Logical fallacies, lies of commission, lies of omission, and projection are their stock in trade. If they decided the sun shines at night, no amout of evidence will shake that view.
It still comes down to this, and the author brings it up: Who cares what Rufo's education was? There's only one thing that's important is his reporting. Was it accurate? And it was!
All that other clabber is nothing but a red herring fallacy. It's totally immaterial to the fact that Gay's plagiarisms were very real, very extensive, and could have easily been discovered long before she was even hired at Harvard, let alone given tenure. And the same applies to Stanford, which is further proof of the depth of corruption at these "elite" universities.
Over the years as an exterminator I've written extensively in defense of my industry, and the use of pesticides, and I will state openly over the course of my career I've found entirely too many people with advanced degrees aren't the brightest pebbles in the brook, and government grant money has made scientific integrity an oxymoron.
But these comments bring up a serious side bar. What if she's right? What if these night students really "are not the same as what we normally think of as Harvard graduate students". Because that statement leaves one of two conclusions: She's lying, or Harvard is committing fraud.
Because if she's not lying, that means Harvard is peddling fraudulent degrees and knowingly offering less quality education? If that's true, then isn't that deliberate fraud, and the last time I looked, fraud is a crime? And if that kind of thing is prevalent throughout the world of academia, perhaps a RICO investigation is in order.
Monica ends her article with this sentence: Any questions as to what's wrecking Harvard and why that school needs a good hosing out?
Critical race theory is rapidly spreading through America’s public
institutions. Yet most Americans have little understanding of the theory
and how it affects their lives. In a new video essay, City Journal contributing editor Christopher F. Rufo
explores the intellectual roots of critical race theory, summarizes his
investigative reporting on this topic, and explains how citizens can fight back in their communities.
Critical race theory is fast becoming America’s new institutional
orthodoxy. Yet most Americans have never heard of it—and of those who
have, many don’t understand it. This must change. We need to know what
it is so we can know how to fight it.
To explain critical race theory, it helps to begin with a brief
history of Marxism. Originally, the Marxist Left built its political
program on the theory of class conflict. Karl Marx believed that the
primary characteristic of industrial societies was the imbalance of
power between capitalists and workers. The solution to that imbalance,
according to Marx, was revolution: the workers would eventually gain
consciousness of their plight, seize the means of production, overthrow
the capitalist class, and usher in a new socialist society.
During the twentieth century, a number of regimes underwent
Marxist-style revolutions, and each ended in disaster. Socialist
governments in the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Cuba, and elsewhere
racked up a body count of nearly 100 million people. They are remembered
for gulags, show trials, executions, and mass starvations. In practice,
Marx’s ideas unleashed man’s darkest brutalities.
By the mid-1960s, Marxist intellectuals in the West had begun to
acknowledge these failures. They recoiled at revelations of Soviet
atrocities and came to realize that workers’ revolutions would never
occur in Western Europe or the United States, which had large middle
classes and rapidly improving standards of living. Americans in
particular had never developed a sense of class consciousness or class
division. Most Americans believed in the American dream—the idea that
they could transcend their origins through education, hard work, and
good citizenship.
But rather than abandon their political project, Marxist scholars in
the West simply adapted their revolutionary theory to the social and
racial unrest of the 1960s. Abandoning Marx’s economic dialectic of
capitalists and workers, they substituted race for class and sought to
create a revolutionary coalition of the dispossessed based on racial and
ethnic categories.
Fortunately, the early proponents of this revolutionary coalition in
the U.S. lost out in the 1960s to the civil rights movement, which
sought instead the fulfillment of the American promise of freedom and
equality under the law. Americans preferred the idea of improving their
country to that of overthrowing it. Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision,
President Lyndon Johnson’s pursuit of the Great Society, and the
restoration of law and order promised by President Richard Nixon in his
1968 campaign defined the post-1960s American political consensus.
But the radical Left has proved resilient and enduring—which is where critical race theory comes in.
Critical race theory is an academic
discipline, formulated in the 1990s and built on the intellectual
framework of identity-based Marxism. Relegated for many years to
universities and obscure academic journals, it has increasingly become
the default ideology in our public institutions over the past decade. It
has been injected into government agencies, public school systems,
teacher training programs, and corporate human-resources departments, in
the form of diversity-training programs, human-resources modules,
public-policy frameworks, and school curricula.
Its supporters deploy a series of euphemisms to describe critical
race theory, including “equity,” “social justice,” “diversity and
inclusion,” and “culturally responsive teaching.” Critical race
theorists, masters of language construction, realize that “neo-Marxism”
would be a hard sell. Equity, on the other hand, sounds non-threatening and is easily confused with the American principle of equality.
But the distinction is vast and important. Indeed, critical race
theorists explicitly reject equality—the principle proclaimed in the
Declaration of Independence, defended in the Civil War, and codified
into law with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the Civil Rights
Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. To them, equality
represents “mere nondiscrimination” and provides “camouflage” for white
supremacy, patriarchy, and oppression.
In contrast to equality, equity as defined and promoted by critical
race theorists is little more than reformulated Marxism. In the name of
equity, UCLA law professor and critical race theorist Cheryl Harris has
proposed suspending private property rights, seizing land and wealth,
and redistributing them along racial lines. Critical race guru Ibram X.
Kendi, who directs the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston
University, has proposed the creation of a federal Department of
Antiracism. This department would be independent of (i.e., unaccountable
to) the elected branches of government, and would have the power to
nullify, veto, or abolish any law at any level of government and curtail
the speech of political leaders and others deemed insufficiently
“antiracist.”
One practical result of the creation of such a department would be
the overthrow of capitalism, since, according to Kendi, “In order to
truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist.” In
other words, identity is the means; Marxism is the end.
An equity-based form of government would mean the end not only of
private property but also of individual rights, equality under the law,
federalism, and freedom of speech. These would be replaced by race-based
redistribution of wealth, group-based rights, active discrimination,
and omnipotent bureaucratic authority. Historically, the accusation of
“anti-Americanism” has been overused. But in this case, it’s not a
matter of interpretation: critical race theory prescribes a
revolutionary program that would overturn the principles of the
Declaration and destroy the remaining structure of the Constitution.
What does critical race theory look like in
practice? Last year, I authored a series of reports focused on critical
race theory in the federal government. The FBI was holding workshops on
intersectionality theory. The Department of Homeland Security was
telling white employees that they were committing “microinequities” and
had been “socialized into oppressor roles.” The Treasury Department held
a training session telling staff members that “virtually all white
people contribute to racism” and that they must convert “everyone in the
federal government” to the ideology of “antiracism.” And the Sandia
National Laboratories, which designs America’s nuclear arsenal, sent
white male executives to a three-day reeducation camp, where they were
told that “white male culture” was analogous to the “KKK,” “white
supremacists,” and “mass killings.” The executives were then forced to
renounce their “white male privilege” and to write letters of apology to
fictitious women and people of color.
This year, I produced another series of reports focused on critical race theory in education. In Cupertino, California, an elementary school forced
first-graders to deconstruct their racial and sexual identities and
rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.” In
Springfield, Missouri, a middle school forced
teachers to locate themselves on an “oppression matrix,” based on the
idea that straight, white, English-speaking, Christian males are members
of the oppressor class and must atone for their privilege and “covert
white supremacy.” In Philadelphia, an elementary school forced
fifth-graders to celebrate “Black communism” and simulate a Black Power
rally to free 1960s radical Angela Davis from prison, where she had
once been held on charges of murder. And in Seattle, the school district
told
white teachers that they are guilty of “spirit murder” against black
children and must “bankrupt [their] privilege in acknowledgement of
[their] thieved inheritance.”
I’m just one investigative journalist, but I’ve developed a database
of more than 1,000 of these stories. When I say that critical race
theory is becoming the operating ideology of our public institutions, I
am not exaggerating—from the universities to bureaucracies to K-12
school systems, critical race theory has permeated the collective
intelligence and decision-making process of American government, with no
sign of slowing down.
This is a revolutionary change. When originally established, these
government institutions were presented as neutral, technocratic, and
oriented toward broadly held perceptions of the public good. Today,
under the increasing sway of critical race theory and related
ideologies, they are being turned against the American people. This
isn’t limited to the permanent bureaucracy in Washington, D.C., but is
true as well of institutions in the states—even red states. It is
spreading to county public health departments, small midwestern school
districts, and more. This ideology will not stop until it has devoured
all of our institutions.
So far, attempts to halt the encroachment of critical race theory have been ineffective. There are a number of reasons for this.
First, too many Americans have developed an acute fear of speaking up
about social and political issues, especially those involving race.
According to a recent Gallup poll, 77 percent of conservatives are
afraid to share their political beliefs publicly. Worried about getting
mobbed on social media, fired from their jobs, or worse, they remain
quiet, largely ceding the public debate to those pushing these
anti-American ideologies. Consequently, the institutions themselves
become monocultures: dogmatic, suspicious, and hostile to a diversity of
opinion. Conservatives in both the federal government and public school
systems have told me that their “equity and inclusion” departments
serve as political offices, searching for and stamping out any dissent
from the official orthodoxy.
Second, critical race theorists have constructed their argument like a
mousetrap. Disagreement with their program becomes irrefutable evidence
of a dissenter’s “white fragility,” “unconscious bias,” or
“internalized white supremacy.” I’ve seen this projection of false
consciousness on their opponents play out dozens of times in my
reporting. Diversity trainers will make an outrageous claim—such as “all
whites are intrinsically oppressors” or “white teachers are guilty of
spirit murdering black children”—and then, when confronted with
disagreement, adopt a patronizing tone and explain that participants who
feel “defensiveness” or “anger” are reacting out of guilt and shame.
Dissenters are instructed to remain silent, “lean into the discomfort,”
and accept their “complicity in white supremacy.”
Third, Americans across the political spectrum have failed to
separate the premise of critical race theory from its conclusion. Its
premise—that American history includes slavery and other injustices, and
that we should examine and learn from that history—is undeniable. But
its revolutionary conclusion—that America was founded on and defined by
racism and that our founding principles, our Constitution, and our way
of life should be overthrown—does not rightly, much less necessarily,
follow.
Fourth and finally, the writers and activists who have had the
courage to speak out against critical race theory have tended to address
it on the theoretical level, pointing out the theory’s logical
contradictions and dishonest account of history. These criticisms are
worthy and good, but they move the debate into the academic
realm—friendly terrain for proponents of critical race theory. They fail
to force defenders of this revolutionary ideology to defend the
practical consequences of their ideas in the realm of politics.
No longer simply an academic matter,
critical race theory has become a tool of political power. To borrow a
phrase from the Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci, it is fast
achieving cultural hegemony in America’s public institutions. It is
driving the vast machinery of the state and society. If we want to
succeed in opposing it, we must address it politically at every level.
Critical race theorists must be confronted with and forced to speak
to the facts. Do they support public schools separating first-graders
into groups of “oppressors” and “oppressed”? Do they support mandatory
curricula teaching that “all white people play a part in perpetuating
systemic racism”? Do they support public schools instructing white
parents to become “white traitors” and advocate for “white abolition”?
Do they want those who work in government to be required to undergo this
kind of reeducation? How about managers and workers in corporate
America? How about the men and women in our military? How about every
one of us?
There are three parts to a successful strategy to defeat the forces
of critical race theory: governmental action, grassroots mobilization,
and an appeal to principle.
We already see examples of governmental action. Last year, one of my
reports led President Trump to issue an executive order banning critical
race theory–based training programs in the federal government.
President Biden rescinded this order on his first day in office, but it
provides a model for governors and municipal leaders to follow. This
year, several state legislatures have introduced bills to achieve the
same goal: preventing public institutions from conducting programs that
stereotype, scapegoat, or demean people on the basis of race. And I have
organized a coalition of attorneys to file lawsuits against schools and
government agencies that impose critical race theory–based programs on
grounds of the First Amendment (which protects citizens from compelled
speech), the Fourteenth Amendment (which provides equal protection under
the law), and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which prohibits public
institutions from discriminating on the basis of race).
On the grassroots level, a multiracial and bipartisan coalition is
emerging to fight critical race theory. Parents are mobilizing against
racially divisive curricula in public schools and employees are
increasingly speaking out against Orwellian reeducation in the
workplace. When they see what is happening, Americans are naturally
outraged that critical race theory promotes three ideas—race
essentialism, collective guilt, and neo-segregation—that violate the
basic principles of equality and justice. Anecdotally, many
Chinese-Americans have told me that, having survived the Cultural
Revolution in their former country, they refuse to let the same thing
happen here.
In terms of principles, we need to employ our own moral language
rather than allow ourselves to be confined by the categories of critical
race theory. For example, we often find ourselves debating “diversity.”
Diversity as most of us understand it is generally good, all things
being equal, but it is of secondary value. We should be talking about
and aiming at excellence, a common standard that challenges
people of all backgrounds to achieve their potential. On the scale of
desirable ends, excellence beats diversity every time.
Similarly, in addition to pointing out the dishonesty of the
historical narrative on which critical race theory is predicated, we
must promote the true story of America—a story
that is honest about injustices in American history, but that places
them in the context of our nation’s high ideals and the progress we have
made toward realizing them. Genuine American history is rich with
stories of achievements and sacrifices that will move the hearts of
Americans, in stark contrast to the grim and pessimistic narrative
pressed by critical race theorists.
Above all, we must have courage, the fundamental virtue required in
our time: courage to stand and speak the truth, courage to withstand
epithets, courage to face the mob, and courage to shrug off the scorn of
elites. When enough of us overcome the fear that currently prevents so
many from speaking out, the hold of critical race theory will begin to
slip. And courage begets courage. It’s easy to stop a lone dissenter;
it’s much harder to stop 10, 20, 100, 1,000, 1 million, or more who
stand up together for the principles of America. Truth and justice are
on our side. If we can muster the courage, we will win.
City Journal is a
publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI), a
leading free-market think tank. Are you interested in supporting the
magazine? As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529).SUPPORT
The story of American deinstitutionalization has become familiar. In a
long arc—from President Kennedy’s Community Mental Health Act of 1963
to the present—federal and state governments dismantled mental asylums
and released the psychiatrically disturbed into the world. Though there
were sometimes brutal abuses in the state mental hospitals of the early
twentieth century, the closure of the asylums did not put an end to
mental illness. If anything, with the proliferation on the streets of
psychosis-inducing drugs such as methamphetamine, the United States has
more cases of serious mental illness than ever before—and less capacity
to treat and manage them.
The question now is not, “What happened to the asylums?” but “What
replaced them?” Following the mass closure of state hospitals and the
establishment of a legal regime that dramatically restricted involuntary
commitments, we have created an “invisible asylum” composed of three
primary institutions: the street, the jail, and the emergency room. In
slaying the old monster of the state asylums, we created a new monster
in its shadow: one that maintains the appearance of freedom but condemns
a large population of the mentally ill to a life of misery.
I’ve spent the better part of two years looking at this invisible
asylum in West Coast cities. In major metropolitan areas such as Los
Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle, the scale of mass psychosis is
overwhelming, and the inadequacy of the public response is self-evident.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to imagine how public officials
could “solve” the problem of mental illness in these places, which are
home to tens of thousands of individuals suffering from the “perilous
trifecta” of mental illness, addiction, and homelessness. By contrast,
the contours of the problem are much more intelligible, even manageable,
in smaller cities and towns.
Olympia, Washington—a city of 52,000 tucked between a joint military
base and a state forest—is one such place. In Olympia, approximately 250
individuals have become entangled within this broken system of care,
cycling through the streets, the local jails, and the emergency ward at
Providence St. Peter Hospital. A half-century ago, many, if not most, of
these wayward souls would have been institutionalized. In 1962,
Washington State had
7,641 state hospital beds for a total population of 2.9 million; today,
it has 1,123 state hospital beds for a population of 7.6 million—a 94
percent per-capita reduction.
In the absence of the old asylums, Olympia’s mentally ill are now
crowded into a city-sanctioned tent encampment, then shuffled through
the institutions of the modern social-scientific state: the jail cell,
the short-term psychiatric bed, the case-management appointment, the
feeding line, and the needle dispensary. In the name of compassion, we
have built a system that may be even crueler than what came before.
It’s 8 AM, and
the streets of Olympia are at low tide. After months of coronavirus
lockdowns, all the businesses in the downtown core have shut down, with
some restaurants, salons, and tattoo shops boarding up their windows
altogether. The only people remaining are those with nowhere to go: the
homeless, the mad, and the addicted.
Patrol Sergeant Amy King and Officer Patrick Hutnik, who oversee the
downtown area for the Olympia Police Department, take me on a tour. The
officers are working their morning rounds, rousting awake people
sleeping in doorways and asking them to move on. We see a slumped-over
man who has soiled himself overnight, a man wrapped in cardboard
complaining that his tent got stolen, and three women behind a barricade
of shopping carts and filthy blankets. One of the women is tying off
her arm with a blue rubber strap but loosens her grip when she sees us;
the other two are barely cognizant, blinking at the officers and
lifelessly nodding their heads.
The cast of characters in Sergeant King’s world is a difficult one.
Hai air-fights through the streets because he believes monsters in the
ground want to enter his body. Michael, an old man, calls 911 many times
per day but doesn’t qualify as “gravely disabled.” Suburban Gary lives
in a broken-down Chevy Suburban full of trash but refuses all offers of
housing or services. And John, wheelchair-bound and covered in sores,
huffs paint in front of officers because he knows he’s “untouchable”—the
hospital will not take him, the prosecutor will not move on his
criminal cases, and the psychiatrists cannot send him for involuntary
treatment.
Following the downfall of the old regime of state asylums, local
jurisdictions have had to create their own makeshift mental-health
systems. In Olympia, as a growing population of mentally ill and
addicted individuals began to overwhelm downtown, the city council
decided to open the “mitigation site,” a publicly funded tent encampment
for 150 residents. In theory, the site would provide centralized
shelter and access to services; in practice, it functions as an open-air
asylum—with none of the protections of the old hospitals.
Brandon, who helps manage the mitigation site for the City of
Olympia, tells me that the people arriving here are “in the gutter.” He
estimates that 95 percent have a substance-abuse disorder and nearly 100
percent have a mental-health condition. Though the city continues to
distribute glossy photos from the site’s opening day, the reality on the
ground is grim—open drug use, fighting, crime, and even a tent filled
with used needles. Brandon says that “thousands of rats” have tunneled
under the site and will chew through the wooden pallets beneath the
tents and the plastic walls of the tiny homes. “There’s soy in the
plastic,” he explains. “It’s like candy to rats.”
“The city’s police force has nicknamed the mitigation site ‘The Thunderdome,’ after the Mad Max movie.”
By ordinance, the city provides mitigation-site residents with basic
social services and some access to care. Sean, a resident recently
released from prison in Idaho, landed at the site and got a prescription
for bipolar disorder “on the spot.” He shows me a plastic freezer bag
filled with bottles of carbamazepine and duloxetine, and explains his
predicament: “I found out, after 40 years, that I was bipolar. I lost
relationships, job, marriage. Now I’m trying to put everything back
together.”
But for most other residents, there is no treatment or recovery—only
the punishing routine of the needle, the pill, and the breakdown. The
city’s police force has nicknamed the mitigation site “The Thunderdome,”
after the dystopian Mad Max movie, because of the raucous
nights, with residents yelling, overdosing, and assaulting one another.
One former resident said that her boyfriend kept her imprisoned in a
tent there, plied her with methamphetamine, and put a knife to her
throat when she tried to leave—all under the supposed supervision of
city officials.
As they finish their morning rounds and head back to the station,
Sergeant King and Officer Hutnik find a disheveled, shirtless man,
passed out with his body extending into the street. Officer Hutnik
politely wakes him, and the man, known as Angry Marty, begins screaming
about zombies and food lines down at the mission. He manically gathers
metal piping tubes from the ground and bangs them into a shopping cart.
“There is going to be a mob that finally takes over this city!” he
screams. “They’re going to kill you! They’re going to kill you!”
Under the current policy regime, this madness has become an eternal
recurrence: the officers will see Marty again tomorrow morning, as he
suffers through another drug-terror, and they must leave him to fend for
himself.
As we head back to the station, we can still hear Marty’s cries in the distance.
“Is that compassion?” Sergeant King asks, disappearing into the doorway.
The Olympia Municipal Jail is the second
link in the city’s invisible asylum. It’s a small, doughnut-shaped
building tucked behind a Japanese garden, with white and blue stucco
walls. The jail has 36 beds, but the city generally won’t hold more than
28 inmates at a time because the old HVAC system can’t handle full
capacity.
After checking in at the front desk, Officers Holmes and Esselstrom
take me through the facility. They show me the intake desk, the
single-stall shower, and the suicide-watch room. They lead me through
the narrow hallways and flip open the steel viewing windows, so I can
see the men and women inside the cells.
I ask the officers how many of the inmates suffer from mental
illness. Officer Esselstrom says that they conduct an intake interview
for every inmate and that “at least 90 percent” say that they have been
diagnosed with a mental illness or have recently received psychiatric
care. The officers explain that they see the same faces, over and over,
often for the same crimes. “Some people have 40 different booking
photos,” says Officer Holmes, explaining that the officers sometimes
play a game in which they listen to the police radio and try to predict
who will come to the jail based on the nature of the call, crime, and
location.
Hannah is one of the inmates who has returned frequently over the
past year. She walks up to the metal visitation grate with some
hesitation, but after she learns that I’m not a representative of the
courts, she tells me her story in a rapid-fire monologue. Hannah grew up
in Auburn, California, and says that she was abandoned by her parents,
and then abused by her grandmother. She was diagnosed with ADHD as a
preteen, and after a series of fights and “explosive behavior” in high
school, she was re-diagnosed as bipolar. She says she got pregnant at
17, then lost the baby when she rolled her car and the seatbelt crushed
her stomach—which sent her life into a spiral. Over the next four years,
she started using methamphetamine, checked in and out of psychiatric
facilities, and then came to Olympia “to start over.”
That plan fell apart, too. For the past year, Hannah has lived on the
streets and at the mitigation site with her boyfriend, a man twice her
age and “a drug dealer and a pimp.” According to Hannah, they have been
involved in a long-running domestic dispute—knives, choking, biting,
drugs—and, despite mutual restraining orders, she always goes back to
him because “it’s hard to say no when he shoves meth in my face.” Today,
she has dirty hair and cracked skin, but it’s easy to see that she was
once beautiful. Officers told me that her mother once came looking for
her and brought an old high school portrait of Hannah with long hair and
intricate makeup—but when the mother eventually found the daughter on
the streets, she told everyone that Hannah was her boyfriend’s
responsibility and promptly left town. Now Hannah is stuck on the
streets and, when her methamphetamine addiction and bipolar disorder
manifest as violence, she ends up in the city jail.
Such stories are commonplace. Across the United States, the jails
have become de facto psychiatric hospitals. Bruce Gage, lead
psychiatrist for the Washington State Department of Corrections, estimates
that 20 percent to 30 percent of state prison inmates suffer from
serious mental illness. The Monroe Correctional Complex outside Seattle,
with nearly 500 beds for the mentally ill, is now the second-largest
psychiatric facility statewide; only Western State Hospital is larger.
“It used to be called deinstitutionalization,” Gage recently told the Seattle Times.
“Now it’s called trans-institutionalization. We took everyone out of
the state hospitals, and they pretty much, the same population, ended up
in prisons and jails.”
This transition from asylum to prison has reached an astonishing scale. According to a study
of 18,000 inmates in the Washington State prison system, 44 percent of
inmates were determined to have mental-health disorders and 51 percent
to have substance-abuse disorders—and 31 percent had both diagnoses
simultaneously. Even the old flagship, Western State Hospital, has
become a predominantly carceral environment, planning to accept only
“forensic patients” who can no longer be held safely in state prisons.
The irony is devastating: as a society, we recoiled from the old
asylums, but we have built in their place a parallel system that serves
the same function, often under even more brutal conditions. We have
adopted a new moral logic that says, “You have the right to be mad, but
if you follow that madness to its logical conclusion, there is a prison
cell waiting for you.” Under the weight of a cultural revolution against
the asylums and civil rights lawsuits against involuntary commitment, a
prison sentence has become the easiest option. The mentally ill get
subsumed into the criminal class.
The final link in the invisible asylum is
the psychiatric emergency room. In Olympia, this means Providence St.
Peter Hospital, home to an 18-bed psychiatric unit that functions as the
first stop for people coming off the streets in crisis. According to
Sue Beall, the hospital’s director of behavioral health, the emergency
psychiatric department receives approximately 500 people a month
presenting symptoms of acute mental illness and substance-abuse
disorders.
Beall describes the hospital as “overwhelmed.” The number of patients
seeking emergency psychiatric care has risen rapidly in the past few
years, and the hospital frequently operates beyond its regular capacity,
issuing “single bed certifications” and allowing people to rest on cots
in the hallways and mats on the floor. The severity of the cases has
increased, too. Beall estimates that, as recently as a few years ago,
only 20 percent of patients needed inpatient treatment; now that figure
is between 50 percent and 60 percent. The result: doctors, nurses, and
support staff are “spread too thin” and burning out under the pressure
of the city’s “revolving door” of addiction, psychosis, and emergency
care. Emergency rooms throughout the region are so pressed with mentally
ill patients that doctors have adopted a policy of “treat ’em and
street ’em”—that is, get patients medically stabilized and out as fast
as possible, to prepare for the next onslaught.
To reduce the burden on emergency providers, the City of Olympia
recently hired a Crisis Response Unit to patrol the streets and build
relationships with the most seriously mentally ill. The team—six men and
women in matching aqua-blue shirts—is headquartered in an open loft
space on the second floor of a downtown storefront. According to program
coordinator Anne Larsen, the Crisis Response Unit engages in more than
250 contacts a month, offering case management, referrals to services,
and even transportation to medical appointments. Yet despite some
successes—a woman placed into permanent housing, another living with her
sister on the Eastside—the team spends most of its time managing a
population of a few hundred mentally ill and addicted people who
continually cycle through their care.
To
reduce the burden on emergency providers, the City of Olympia recently
hired a Crisis Response Unit to patrol the streets and build
relationships with the most seriously mentally ill. (STEVE BLOOM/THE
OLYMPIAN)
When I arrive in the Crisis Response Unit’s offices, the team is
gathered around an old laptop and problem-solving some of their most
difficult cases. They’re talking through the file for Eddie, who was
living with his mother in rural Pacific County until she couldn’t handle
his mental illness, packed him up in an Airstream trailer, and dropped
him off on the streets of Olympia. Eddie began hoarding trash in his
trailer, increased his drug use, and rapidly deteriorated. Eddie’s
sister recently came looking for him and, together with the crisis
response team, tracked him down on the streets. They’re trying to
petition the court for a Joel’s Law detention—a form of involuntary
commitment for drug psychoses—but they have hit a bureaucratic
roadblock.
According to the crisis workers, it’s very hard to get any kind of
involuntary detention. Larsen says that the Crisis Response Unit
requests only one psychiatric hold evaluation per month, on average,
because the standard is so high and varies so widely from doctor to
doctor. The people on the streets, most of whom have gone through
repeated evaluations, have rehearsed the answers that will get them
immediately released: “I’m not a danger to myself or others, I know
where I can sleep, I know where I can get food.” When I ask the team how
difficult it is to get a long-term involuntary commitment at Western
State Hospital, their response is unanimous: “Impossible.”
In total, according to the latest available data,
designated crisis responders filed 1,599 petitions for involuntary
holds in Thurston County, and the courts approved only 411 cases for
inpatient detention—and the vast majority
of these were for short-term, 14-day holds. To illustrate how
challenging it is to secure an involuntary commitment, crisis workers
told me that they once found a woman eating a dead rat in an alleyway,
but this did not qualify her as “gravely disabled”; the reaction from
relevant officials was that “at least she’s eating.”
The mentally ill end up playing a game of cat and mouse with the
authorities. Jeremiah, a 32-year-old man in recovery from bipolar
disorder and alcohol and methamphetamine addiction, told me that he
would run wild in the streets: “I would be screaming at traffic, jumping
up and down on cars, yelling and cussing at families, saying their kids
are my kids.” At the end of one vodka-fueled bender, Jeremiah passed
out on the train tracks and lost both his arms to the heavy steel of a
freight locomotive. Even after his accident, the police department and
crisis response team spent years trying to get Jeremiah help, following
him through a series of short-term emergency visits, psychiatric
evaluations, and stints in the municipal jail.
Finally, something changed. Larsen, the program coordinator, pulled
every lever at her disposal and organized the entire apparatus of local
government to pressure Jeremiah into accepting treatment. It took a
massive mobilization—involving a hospital ward, an evaluation center, a
jail term, two treatment programs, a halfway house, a street
intervention, and a warrant hearing—but eventually Jeremiah relented. I
asked him what had changed, and he said: “I called my mom on Mother’s
Day from jail. I wanted to do something with my life.”
Jeremiah now stays at a recovery home on the edge of town. When I
visit him there, he says that he has been sober for more than a year.
“It’s my longest time clean since I was 11 years old,” he says. Jeremiah
still distrusts authorities—when I took out my notebook, he asked if I
was trying to get him recommitted—but acknowledges that he wouldn’t have
gotten clean without the intense pressure of the local government.
“Treatment was necessary,” he says, “even if I didn’t like how it came
to me.”
In 1961, French theorist Michel Foucault reenvisioned the history of mental illness in his book Madness and Civilization,
which documented the role of confinement, morality, and medicine from
the Middle Ages to modernity. Foucault yielded some profound insights,
but, like his radical-progressive American counterparts, he savaged the
practice of confinement without proposing a substantive alternative.
Nearly 60 years later, it has become clear that the liberationists of
the 1960s did not usher in a new era of freedom but something far
darker. By reducing the entire cultural history of madness to one long
progression of brutality, imprisonment, and false care, they laid the
political groundwork for deinstitutionalization. At the same time, their
insistence that mental illness was a “myth,” that it could be cured by
new psychiatric drugs, or that it would be transformed through political
consciousness turned out to be wrong.
Today, a consensus is emerging that deinstitutionalization went too
far. In Washington State, a bipartisan coalition of legislators has
implemented the beginnings of a reform agenda. In the past few years,
the legislature has added acute substance-abuse disorder as a condition for involuntary treatment, extended the initial involuntary hold period from 72 hours to five days, and adopted plans to add 844 new inpatient psychiatric beds across the state. The state mental-health budget has nearly doubled in recent years, with widespread support from both Democratic and Republican lawmakers.
Do these reforms go far enough? Probably not. Washington hopes to increase
its psychiatric bed capacity to 1,763 beds by 2025, or 23 beds per
100,000 residents. While that’s a significant increase from the current
baseline, the goal still falls far short of the historical average of
263 beds per 100,000 at the height of the asylum period. Though advances
in psychiatric drugs and outpatient treatment could reduce the total
need for inpatient beds, it’s illusory to believe that we can operate at
9 percent of the capacity of the 1960s. For anyone who has witnessed
the great masses of the mad wandering the streets of American downtowns,
it’s obvious that our cultural and legal intransigence against
confinement cannot hold.
Frontline workers in the current system understand this reality but
hesitate to offer their full-throated endorsement of rebuilding the
hospitals. When I ask Sergeant King for her opinion on the need for more
involuntary psychiatric beds, she replies cautiously. “I have to be
careful. I don’t want my words twisted,” she says, calibrating her
language in order to avoid the charge of “criminalizing” mental illness.
“I think we were too restrictive in the past, but we’ve swung the
pendulum too far in the other direction.”
Perhaps what’s most needed is a renewed theoretical defense of the
principles of the asylum—safety, rest, morality, and health—that
Foucault and his compatriots demolished. This does not mean a return to
the historical practices of the asylum but a revival of the spirit that
animated the care and moral reasoning of the old retreats and hôpitaux. It is a moral scandal that our society, which has surpassed
the material wealth of the nineteenth century 16-fold, cannot provide
an adequate sanctuary for the mad and the unmoored. It’s easy to condemn
the horrors of the old state hospitals, but the horrors of the
invisible asylum may exceed them.
“Perhaps what’s most needed is a renewed defense of the principles of the asylum—safety, rest, morality, and health.”
In my short time on Olympia’s streets, I
heard about a litany of abuses and indignities that occurred under our
current regime—a disabled man whose feet are rotting off, a woman hunted
down like prey, a woman waking up on top of a corpse.
But the neglect is even more heartbreaking. Whenever I consider
today’s system, I see the awful silhouette of a young man crumpled
across a restaurant ingress, bare-chested and overwhelmed with madness.
He introduces himself as Harrison and, revealing a Hindu-style third eye
tattooed on his forehead, rattles on about angels and demons. He points
to Officer Hutnik and says: “I once cured you of an infection.” Then he
picks up an old Rubik’s Cube from his pile and, twitching with feverish
intensity, points to the white squares and says, “This is where you can
find me anywhere in the universe.”
A more muscular system of care could help this haunted soul. After we
say good-bye to him, Hutnik tells me that he remembers Harrison from
his time as a correctional worker at the Thurston County Jail a decade
ago. “It’s amazing how you see another side of people after they’ve
detoxed and gone on medication in jail,” Hutnik says. And this is
precisely the insanity of our current system: in fear of “criminalizing
mental illness,” we have simply delayed care until the mentally ill
engage in explicit criminality. We thus condemn legions of vulnerable
people like Harrison to street, jail, or emergency room. Until we
rebuild the physical capacity and moral strength to help them, nothing
will change.
Christopher F. Rufo is a contributing editor of City Journal
and director of the Discovery Institute’s Center on Wealth &
Poverty. He has directed four documentaries for PBS, including his new
film, America Lost.
Top Photo: An outreach worker arrives under Olympia’s Fourth
Avenue Bridge to assist homeless people residing there. (KEN LAMBERT/THE
SEATTLE TIMES)
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