[Ayoob]

I got a job in the maximum security ward in the hospital for the criminally insane recently. In my new job, I will be working with people not guilty of murder by reason of insanity, child molesters, those types.

In an economic collapse, I know the government will shut services off. At what point would you guys want me to lose my job, and what happens then?

I've done a little research on what I'm going into. The patients I'm going to have are some of the most manipulative examples of humanity you can find, and they are extremely dangerous. There are a lot of rules where I work about how many people can be in a room at a time, whether you can allow a patient to stand behind you, all that kind of thing.

How bad would things have to be before you want me to lose my job?

Also, what would you want to have happen to these people? Would you want to open the doors and push them out with no food and no home?

Part of the reason I took this job is because I think it's pretty secure. If I didn't work here I think I would be prepared to lose my home to property taxes before I would want these particular patients released into the general population.

What are your thoughts?

[vtsnowedin]

Hitler, Stalin, Pol pot, They are all pretty consistant in that one of the first things they do is shoot or otherwise do in all the mental patients. Much easier then letting them loose and run the danger of them being crazy like a fox and coming back to shoot you.
If you let them go the general population will know you did it and will view you as the enemy for doing it and view all strangers as a potential nut case. Makes for trigger happy natives.

Don't turn your back!

[mrobert]

Exactly how many billions we waste of people who killed children, etc ... just because it's not their fault. The voices made them do it.

If a person steals some potatoes to eat, he gets 5 years.
If someone rapes a girl, he stays 5 years in these wonderful facilities.

[seahorse]

Interesting responses. They prove my point that ultimately people cannot escape their evolutionary bias and solve problems by killing it. It is, afterall, the easiest way to solve problems, including the problem of PO. It is probably the fairest solution, in that, the ultimate rule of fairness is the strongest survive.

[Ayoob]

Killing does not have to be the answer. I'm currently under the impression that child molesters cannot be rehabilitated. There are more solutions to this situation than killing those guilty of that crime. I know for sure that there is at least one island prison that holds these patients/prisoners, and that they are held beyond their sentences.

Let's not go off the deep end just yet.

It may be the case that some kind of isolation is required. An island prison is one possible scenario. I'm sure there are others, but I haven't gotten into this topic much just yet.

At the moment, I'm laboring under the idea that people would prefer to keep these patients/prisoners in some kind of institution for their natural lives, and possibly have them engage in life sustaining work.

Before we start talking about anything weirder than life sentences and farming, why not just go that far and see what you think would be a good idea for the criminally insane.

[Micki]

I don't understand your question.
What would I do if YOU lost YOUR job....
Nothing is the short answer.

You mean if I was you?
Well the fact that you work with mentally insane has nothing to do with the quetions. If I was You, or Anyone and I lost my job, I would look at my skill set and and see what is the best job I can get.

If you are having trouble working with people who are criminally insanse I would suggest you look for something else very quickly.
The idea of someone being insane is that they can't be held responsible for their actions and therefore not sentenced like a normal crimanal. If you can't handle that, move on.

[Ayoob]

I don't understand your question.
What would I do if YOU lost YOUR job....
Nothing is the short answer.

You mean if I was you?
Well the fact that you work with mentally insane has nothing to do with the quetions. If I was You, or Anyone and I lost my job, I would look at my skill set and and see what is the best job I can get.

If you are having trouble working with people who are criminally insanse I would suggest you look for something else very quickly.
The idea of someone being insane is that they can't be held responsible for their actions and therefore not sentenced like a normal crimanal. If you can't handle that, move on.

This is the Americas discussion. Thank you for your input.

[wisconsin_cur]

I work with a similar, though less acute, population in a different state. Sometime before coming to you they went through someone like me. Because I have more of a mixed bag I fully expect to receive a phone call at some point that says "they've discharged everyone. Do not bother coming into work."

With your group I would say it depends upon your facility. When the grid is down, and when your back up generators run out of fuel, do the doors stay locked (ours pop open)? If they stay locked I would not be too surprised if you got the order to stay home and to ask no questions.

What would I like to see happen? Well, we could ship them down under. or let them fight in the resource wars.

[GoghGoner]

Federal, state, or local funding?

In my state, the state government closed down most mental heath hospitals about a decade ago.

[Newfie]

It is an interesting question. Loosing that population onto the streets would not make things any nicer. Then again, I would presume that the County, then State prisons would be opened up before yours. And that yours would open at the same time as the Fed Max prisons. So my assumption would be that, if you lost your job, then your population would only be a minority of the released inmates we are dealing with in the general population.

My guess is that our best model would be some inner-city district where a very high percentage of the population have already been in jail. What is that like? Lots of street crime, drug violence, drive by shootings. Those areas would get worse with the increased competition and poorer economic climate. Currently moderate areas would move toward the inner-city ghetto condition, suburbia would become moderate.

I live in a pretty nice downtown neighborhood that is bordered by a moderate area which quickly goes to ghetto. My personal neighborhood may be hit hard.

I have an agreement with my wife; if we need to pick up a gun to defend ourselves, we move. The trick is to sell before the bottom falls out of the market or have enough resources to survive the financial loss. I have places to go that will NOT be effected by the loosing of loonies, but I gotta get there.

[emeraldg40]

Im from America and I understand your question. However I do not think it will get that bad that you will lose your job due to the place being shut down. I do think they may consolidate facilities etc to save on resources. I actually have faith in the upcoming generations and see the prison population decreasing. Call me hopeful. If the DA in Dallas has anything to do with it......people being exonerated daily due to DNA evidence. Shame on America for locking up the innocent.

[vtsnowedin]

The question was put forward as what to do in an economic collapse. Not a recession, not a depression but a collapse. A collapse will bring us hard up against realitys that most have never thought of much less actually faced. Able bodied adults will be having a hard time just getting enough to keep body and sole together plus feeding children too young to work and caring for their sick and aged family members. Convicts and mental patients in institutions will be way way down on peoples priority lists.
What to do with them then is a good question. We can't turn the lions out of the zoo and into the sheep pasture and we have no meat to feed them in their cage. Just like PETA finds itself putting down kittens and puppys every day there is a big differance between what you want to do and what you really have to do. If it ever got that bad a single bullet in the head is about all they can expect.

[ReverseEngineer]

In a collapse situation, your problem is really not at all the currently incarcerated murderers, rapists and child molesters. These folks are mainly the product of a society which was marginally sick for a number of years, and represent only a small portion of the total population at the moment. Your real problem is with all the NEW murderers, rapists and child molesters that a completely dysfunctional society with virtually no effective police force or effective legal means of punishment exists will produce. We call such people "Zombies" here.

What is the difference between a murderer and a local warlord or gang banger? What is the difference between a child molester and a slave trader? Go to some countries which have been in a perpetual state of collapse, drug gangs murder people regularly, children are sold into the sex trade industry regularly also.

Certainly, while you have this bunch of sociopaths all bundled up in one place, once you can no longer afford to run the prison, the most likely outcome would be they are all shot on the spot. However, this will hardly rid the population of this problem, since it will produce many more to take their place in very short order. Once you no longer are running prisons and no longer have an effective police force to handle this problem, what happens? In most cases one would expect vigilante justice, and this will be part of the mix, but you also will have organized groups of socioplaths who are equally violent. At a certain point, it becomes pretty difficult to separate good and evil here, and of course without a good justice system you always have the problem of the falsely accused when you run a vigilante justice system. Think Clint Eastwood in "Hang 'em High". Clint being Clint managed to SURVIVE being Hanged by a bunch of Vigilantes, and then was given a Badge with the license to hunt down the men who Hung him. Gotta remember here that scene where Theodore Bikel puts the badge on the desk and when Clint goes to pick it up he slams his hand down on Clint's with the Bell tolling Death.

If/when the society devolves into complete collapse, the few criminals currently incarcerated will be the LEAST of your problems. Your real problems will come from all the NEW criminals, who you don't know yet. You have few options in this situation, and it really falls to the individuals involved as to whther they will fall on the side of Good or the side of Evil. Make no mistake, those who fall on the side of Evil will use guns, and they will take no prisoners. Evil self-organizes into gangs, and good people must organize as well. In the situation of total collapse, you have to know Evil when it appears, and there is really only one solution. You fight fire with fire. You Shoot to Kill.

Reverse Engineer

[Revi]

It's hard to tell what would happen to all those people, and even to people who aren't any threat to society, but can't take care of themselves. In a world with no extra anything it will be hard to convince people to take care of people who aren't kin. I know that in Guatemalan prisons people didn't eat too well unless they had relatives bringing extra tortillas. I imagine prisons turning back into prison farms where the inmates raise a good portion of their own food. People who are not able to do farm work may not be as lucky.

Here in Maine we had the poor farms as well. They will come back too. It's going to really stink to have to go to one. They only went away in the 40's and 50's. A common thing was to try to drive your town's paupers over into the next town. In the 1800's they would send the town's paupers to the mills in Massachusetts as labor. There's no place to send them now.

Check out this page on Maine poorhouses and farms. They used to lump criminals, insane people, old people and paupers into the same group. The article on the poor farms from Norlands was really interesting. It weren't no picnic, that's for sure!

http://www.poorhousestory.com/poorhouses_in_maine.htm

[Ferretlover]

Ayoob, I don't want you or Cur (or anyone for that matter) to lose their jobs.
I assume that the inmates of those institutions are there for good reasons, among them being that those people cannot function in "normal" society without causing mayhem.
When "normal" society collapses, there, quite possibly, will be no funds to pay the guards/guardians, no food, no medications, etc. They will be dangerous places to be, no matter on what side of the cell/door you are.
In the worst possible scenario, yes, I can see the patients/prisoners being terminated. Before that, I would assume that those with the fewest problems would be released on their own recognisence(sp?), and the results would not be good. For instance:

Disabled assaults a 'hidden shame'
By Carol Nader April 16, 2008
A WOMAN with an intellectual disability was admitted to hospital 70 times over several years because of injuries she sustained when her husband assaulted her.
The woman also acquired a brain injury caused by a combination of excessive drinking and head trauma from the repeated assaults.
The assaults resulted in lacerations, bruising, swelling and fractures. The hospital admissions were also due to self-harm and suicide attempts.
Public Advocate Colleen Pearce has highlighted the recent case of the woman, known as "Cath", as an example of the abuse experienced by people with disabilities, what she describes as our "hidden shame".
Last year, Ms Pearce's office helped 202 people with intellectual disabilities, acquired brain injury, mental illness or dementia who were victims of physical or sexual assault and rape. These are just the people helped by her office, so it is likely there are many more.She says people with cognitive impairments are at higher risk of abuse than others. "People with a disability are often silent victims," she said. "Some of them might be ignorant about their treatment or abuse."
Ms Pearce said Cath had been threatened with weapons, locked out of her house and restrained by force. She had also been assaulted by friends of her husband. At one stage she gained an intervention order against her husband, but he continued to see her and assault her. One incident of assault was witnessed by a support worker, but the worker did not call the police. It was possible that the worker may not have reported it because the woman asked her not to.
But Ms Pearce, who raised the issue of abuse this week at a disability forum, said sometimes abuse could manifest in ways that were less overt, such as neglect. … [url=http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/disabled-assaults-a-hidden-shame/2008/04/15/1208025189611.htmlAssaults[/url]

[SuperTico]

I got a job in the maximum security ward in the hospital for the criminally insane recently. In my new job, I will be working with people not guilty of murder by reason of insanity,

Do you work in the Pentagon or the White House ??

Actually he works at Fukkinham palace, protecting the inbreds, and he wears a " Blair 2012" pin.......

[Pops]

In an economic collapse, I know the government will shut services off. At what point would you guys want me to lose my job, and what happens then?

Reagan put those folks on the street.

We are still here.

<Shrug>

[ReverseEngineer]

In an economic collapse, I know the government will shut services off. At what point would you guys want me to lose my job, and what happens then?

Reagan put those folks on the street.

True enough. When Reagan put the Criminally Insane back out on the streets in the 80s, who would have thought they would become Wall Street Bankers? LOL

Reverse Engineer

[lowem]

I got a job in the maximum security ward in the hospital for the criminally insane recently. In my new job, I will be working with people not guilty of murder by reason of insanity,

Do you work in the Pentagon or the White House ??

You left out Congress.