California: Millions for jail, not a dime for the disabled

When I was a child, the first wave of de-institutionalization of the mentally insane and developmentally disabled occurred as part of a conspiracy by idiot lefty do-gooders who thought that all those disabled people were actually just being put-upon by The Man, and tighty righties who saw an immediate way to reduce spending on social services and fuck the retards and nutballs, I got mine and fuck you, yeah baby! The old lady who ran a boarding house on the other side of my grandfather's back fence saw an immediate opportunity. She kicked out all her low-rent tenants, filled out the licensing paperwork to become a "community group home" for the disabled, and filled up the rooms in her shabby boarding house with retarded and mentally disabled adults for a much higher per-week rate. She didn't actually *do* anything for these people, mind you, except cook them a couple of cheap meals of beans and cornbread every day and occasionally run one of them to the doctor when he seemed ill. She didn't really bother too much with cleanliness, for example, or with meds for the ones that had medical problems. When the state inspectors finally shut the "group home" down after one of the residents died of neglect, they found a scene of indescribable squalor, as un-potty-trained mentally retarded adults were found literally sleeping in their own accumulated urine and feces.

For those with severe cognitive disorders, a "community group home" is a sick joke. The State of California, for example, has eight inspectors for the entire state to make sure that patients are receiving proper care. Group homes go for years with no inspection because there are no inspectors to do the inspecting. For patients who still have living relatives complaints can get an inspection more swiftly, but old lady Woodson was quite careful to select only residents with no listed next-of-kin.

The State of California once ran an extensive chain of nursing homes for the severely disabled. In those nursing homes, the severely disabled could receive the care they needed and had access to the resources they needed in order to survive and have a reasonable quality of life. Now the State is closing them down, to be replaced by prisons. Because, remember, it's more important to lock up a man for selling whacky weed to willing customers, whacky weed that has never killed anybody in the history of the planet, than to care for the least amongst us. After all, it's those retards and crazy people's own damned fault for not pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. They should have chosen to be born intelligent sane white Christian fellers like you and me, gosh darn it! Remember, the 11th Commandment of the Republican Bible is "I got mine, and fuck everybody else." Hallaleujah, AMEN!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Cross-posted over at the Mockingbird's place