Sunday, February 13, 2005

institutionalization

You see I don’t understand what’s wrong with institutionalization. The institutionalization where we isolate the people and kids on distant and depopulated country sides is easily wrong. I think the “crimes against humanity” is when we abandoned the mentally disabled to the system . I could make the case that deinstitutionalization of today is worst than anything we could think up in institutionalization –we created a smarter way to hide the inhuman care of the disabled and the politicians are exempt from any accountability. Whether they are institutionalized should depend on the needs of the individual –we should always strive for the most freedom and independence.

The sin of institutionalization was that the bureaucrats, politicians and members of the public used institutionalization as a tool of isolation –they put them in those facilities to hide the disabled. These bureaucrats and politicians should never have abandoned the disabled in those facilities –we should have been actively engaged in the management of quality of the facilities. They should have used their access of the facilities as tools of public transparencies. It was the responsibilities of the bureaucrats no matter what the cost, to maintain human dignity to the mentally disabled. It is what we are as a country.

So the question is how are we to maintain skills and education levels of the employees –you can do that by making them state and governmental employees. On the other side it could be a private enterprise –it would have to be heavily regulated. So you could have rather large facilities within a rather short distant of the families –you could have all sorts of campus like housing, with all sorts of levels of freedom.

Of course in a large facility –you get an unprecedented concentration of people with all sorts of problems –this is a golden opportunity with education of the staffs and professional people. In a large facility you have a large concentration of the disabled, the employees and the public, coming and going –so if something becomes to go wrong –you always have the opportunity to created a governmental scandal, with government you always having the imperative to be held responsible to the public –meaning transparency.

On the other side of today with deinstitutionalization you get a host of rather small mental health contractors. The country is extraordinarily fracture in the organization of the care of the vulnerable, you get a extremely small oversight with the regulators and a intentional restriction of resources to them –they have very little opportunity to know what is really going on and are highly politicized –and this just so happens to isolate the politicians to their accountability of what is going on. So the disabled are dispersed throughout the community, which makes it hard to get an idea of what’s really going. So in these dispersions you don’t have the ability to see the failure of the system like you would in institutionalization –you have become more blinded to crimes against humanity. More to the point in deinstitutionalization of today, we got a huge shield of privacy of the businesses and the owners of the mental hospitals –whereas this makes us more blinded to the enormous system dysfunction.

So as in the Vermont state metal hospital and governor Douglas –you’re getting a reinvention of the old deinstitutionalization today. All it is about is political protection –keep that dark stain off the politician’s media records and it is the same in both political parties. So what will be the state and federal mental admission criteria for these businesses on the disabled –I say it’s more going to be about some nameless bureaucrat looking at some data sheet in the name of a politician’s self interest and reelections. So in the name of political budgets your going to get cover-ups, extraordinary incomes to the owners of the businesses and professional staffs, who is going to have to proactively cover-up the inhumanity of equating dignity with money, this will fertilize the continues pain of the disabled because they are going to have to protect the politicians. Oh you are going to get cheaper human service budget –but as we have today, the “world” will look at our disgraceful gulag in our jails with incarcerating the mentally disabled instead of humanly taking care of them and protecting them from trouble.

Of course you got to wonder about the legal system that puts these vulnerable people in jail with the lawyers and judges. Do they really think it is justice that they are dishing out? So you got these judges and prosecutors whom mindlessly follow the laws and policies – but they have not a care of what they are sending these people too. You got the lawyers, prosecutors and judges who have no oversight responsibilities of these facilities –no ethical and moral responsibility to go actively looking for injustice, and no individuals moral instinct to force the public and politicians to face up to our responsibilities to maintain dignity to the least of us. Oh, it’s bigger than the lack of dignity of the disabled –it is are ability to know what right and wrong is with our educated elite class. You should be worried when our legal system allows so much human degradations without fight, the biggest fight of their lives in the face of this massive state of injustice.

Will the legal system be depressed and indifferent to an injustice applied against you –will they just mindlessly follow the rules –will they not care about what’s going outside their court buildings –it reminds me of the seeds of Nazi Germany and totalerization.

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