From Truthout:
Americans love a Victorian asylum. As paranormal entertainment, they offer thrill-seeking with the assumption that the days are long gone when almost anyone could have you committed for almost any reason, often for life.
Yet for decades, academics, pundits, and politicians across the political spectrum have been openly calling for a return to the asylum. Now, a new executive order signed by Trump on June 24, 2025, proposes that states use civil commitment laws to disappear unhoused people, mad and disabled people, and (some) people who use drugs into long-term congregate institutions and coercive programs. Welcome back to the asylum.
Deploying a punitive approach to houselessness, substance use, and psychiatric disability, the executive order, aptly titled “ENDING CRIME AND DISORDER ON AMERICA’S STREETS,” paints a familiar picture of dangerous and undesirable vagrants that must be purged from society and forcibly cured for the sake of order. It reproduces a long-perpetrated false narrative that the root causes of houselessness are “serious mental illness and addiction,” rather than skyrocketing housing costs. The executive order ends federal support for harm reduction programs and the Housing First model, instead incentivizing states and localities to adopt or expand the law-and-order approach. It would also allow police to access the protected health data of unhoused people, contributing to the growth of carceral AI beyond its already expansive reach on disabled and mad people and their caregivers. Continue reading >>>
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