It's not anything close to unanimously agreed upon that they are better than what we're doing now. We have entire advocacy organizations who are opposed to incarcerating the mentally ill.
Yes, and those organizations are dumb, and should be ignored. Any organization that somehow thinks that leaving mentally ill people on the streets to live in squalor and danger is better than institutionalization should not have a place in policy decisions.
It is mind-boggling to me that this is at all debatable.
Obviously we need to mandate levels of treatment and care, and constantly audit institutions to ensure conditions are maintained at a high level. But this is not even remotely an unsolved problem. We shouldn't let the failures of the past force us into failures today.
That's a strawman argument. They are not arguing that it's good for people to live on the streets. What they are arguing is that the abuse associated with making it easier to incarcerate mentally ill people is too great of a risk.
