💾 Archived View for splint.rs › homeless.gmi captured on 2023-06-14 at 14:39:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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People gravitate towards what's familiar. By the time I'd got my degree I was a long way from the homeless kid I once was. Thieving from super markets was an exciting but distant memory, and the occasional supermarket bin-raids ('skipping') I would do were middle-class fun, rather than necessity.
Nevertheless, when I had to get a job, I went for one in a homeless unit, and got a view from the other side of the counter. It was exactly what you'd expect for the first few years.
The younger generation were bubbly but had a completely hopeless future. The older generation were resigned to their position. Occasionally there were spot checks for heroine users, to make sure they were still breathing.
The handbooks gifted you a mixture of lies and non-statements designed to keep the corporation which houses homeless people safe. One I'll never forget had a list of drugs and their effects. It looked like it'd been printed out from some tacky website. The entry on acid mentioned that freaking out was a possibility, then went on to say that even thinking about having a bad trip could cause a bad trip.
I had visions of some middle-aged woman consulting the handbook after a young person came in giggling about being on acid, then gravely turning the pages of the mammoth binder, full of drug lore, in order to give sage advice.
Don't freak out!
Don't get scared of a bad trip or you could end up in a really bad one, and it'll be a nightmare, okay?
The overall results of the institution couldn't fail to disappoint. Let's imagine we consider 100% of people who stay in these homeless units a complete success unless they were kicked out, arrested, died, or returned to the institutions within six months of leaving.
By that metric, the success rate was somewhere under 5%.
The incentives I saw have made me suspicious of all of these institutions. When staying in such a unit, the most important thing to do is ensure all new users instantly receive housing benefits. Normally, housing benefits have a maximum cap of about £300, depending on various things. Homeless units claims over £300 *per week* for each resident, meaning £1200 per month. This isn't their only income - they also spend time applying to charities ('other' charities, so that's charities applying to charities), to ensure that any money meant to support homeless people goes to them.
If someone stays for 10 years in homeless units, and each month costs £1200, then that's £144,000 for the lot, and 10 years is not an unreasonable anchor.
I started looking at the institution in a new way - not as something which failed to help people, but a business designed to milk people for as much money as possible.
The suicide checks took on a new light after that - when drug-use came up, the most important thing was that it was not disruptive. Heroine fits that perfectly, but a death does not.
Then there's the structure of the place. Studies on heroine have been trialed with rats, and the initial findings were simply 'rats like heroine'. After a sufficient number of rats OD'd, the kai-squared was high, that allowed the meta-studies to show conclusively that heroine induces more heroine, until eventually rats (or people) die.
Later researchers noted that rats do not normally live alone in cages eating pellets, and decided to put multiple rats in a very large and interesting environment, with heroine. Some took a little heroine, others did not.
With this in mind, the hostels were bespoke dependency centres. They consist of little concrete rooms with a bed and a television. After 6 hours of daytime TV, the occupant gets unbearably bored. They either socialise, or take drugs. If they socialise, there's a good chance they're taking drugs.
This, of course, is prime material for Tory fantasies about how it's technically possible - indeed *well* within the laws of physics - for someone with no education to sit in a concrete room, exercise well, eat healthily, take an online course in their local library, then start a booming business, just as long as they're not a fundamentally useless cretin, made fat by welfare cheques.
This myth that 'possible means possible', and 'anyone can do it', was alive and well in the hostel, even if the workers weren't generally Tories. One striking afternoon I accompanied a massive man (about five feet, and seven feet tall) back to his room. He'd just got out of prison. I don't know if he had both eyes when he went in.
I asked if he had any plans. He informed me that a little girl had been murdered in the local area (this was outer Glasgow), and that he planned to go to the nearby college, become a judge, and sentence the murderer to death. He raised his voice as he gave me details of the fantasy, where he was (you could see the hand movements) holding a gavel, and (I can only imagine) wearing a fancy wig.
I asked where he got this idea. The staff had told him.
While this sounds like the staff must have made some cruel joke, I don't think that's what happened. I think he had proposed the fantasy of being a judge to them, and they had said, blank-eyed and factual, that if someone wants to become a judge, they must first go to college, take the bar exam, practice law, and finally become a judge.
It was all technically true in some sense. This mono-syllabic troglodyte, homeless in his forties, who was unaware of every mistake in his fantasy, could have got an education, studied for the bar exam, and eventually become a judge, then carry out Britain's first death sentence in a century, and he would not have broken a single law known to modern physicists.
This 35 cubic feet of muscle and childish fantasies was encouraged to go to college, but the young girl who liked to write stories was not. She wasn't alone, but she might be the most striking case of the system making sure it's golden egg-layers didn't stray anywhere.
She had a rough time at home - I don't know the details, but she was obviously switched on, so she stood out from the others. She was reasonably caught up with modern affairs, and had creative hobbies. She was instructed not to hang around with the number of men around the hostel who would invite her to hang out.
As with everyone else, she grew painfully bored with her concrete box, so eventually, she went to other people's concrete boxes, or would wander outside to socialize with other characters in the greater Glasgow area.
There was never a single discussion in the homeless units about the simple fact that putting someone alone in a small room has been deemed illegal even in prisons, because humans were not designed to sit in concrete boxes with the sole occupation of not doing drugs.
One night-shift as she was talking I explained College to her. I almost felt like I was some dirty traitor, pilfering the company's goods. She had no idea about how it was done. She didn't know she could get accomodation there, and sleep in a nice room with college kids rather than in a homeless unit. She wasn't aware the institute could take care of the money if she didn't have any. Not a single hostel worker had told her. Not her 'key-worker', not the staff who spent 1 hour every day writing reports on how everyone there was doing, and especially not the management.
Management would be far too sensible for that sort of things. The other unit workers weren't familiar enough with college to mention it themselves. The young woman herself was also not familir with educational institutions. The system had all the bars it needed baked into the background.
There were other tricks played with definitions.
One person had a number of peculiar characteristics:
These characteristics give a very clear picture, but social services disagreed. This person was not, in any way, disabled, and simply had to find a job.
Nothing was made of the fact that she already had a job, but that it did not pay quite as much as the rent, so she just kept paying every bill, and going to work, and doing everything she was told, until someone kicked her out of her home. Then she had to go to a homeless unit. She was there for all the years I was, and there was nothing remotely close to a plan for her to go anywhere else.
The schizophrenic man who would shout at the TV in the middle of the night had a diagnosis, but no help. He would never leave, and the mental health services simply said they had no room for him.
The system is not broken, nor is anyone incompetent. The system is impressive. In fact, it's not clear how you could imagine a better system for milking money from people.