GarbageShoot , 25 days ago

tl;dr I don’t have an answer for your problem, but I have some thoughts on it that hopefully might contribute to you finding an answer.

I think it’s probably bad to think of the homeless, etc. as being drug-addled and especially as being dangerous. Usually, if they do have a drug problem (especially alcoholism) it came after becoming homeless and not before, and functions as a way to self-medicate to ease the pain of their terrible conditions. There is, of course, a strong correlation with mental illness that they are often also self-medicating, but “mentally ill” does not mean the same thing as “dangerous”. You probably don’t want to have them as a baby sitter, but that’s much more because of mental illness impairing their ability to care for others (and often themselves) rather than there being a realistic chance they would actually hurt the child directly.

People, religions, politicians, corporations and so on speak of charity as a great thing, and it’s certainly not a bad thing, but there being a need for charity for people to survive is a symptom of a system that doesn’t care for a substantial portion of the population that lives in it, and typically brutally exploiting those people. Charity is like a bandage, it can help to tend to a wound that has been inflicted, but we must ask “Why is there a wound in the first place? What inflicted it? How can it be prevented?” Your society, like mine, is organized in part to hurt these people in order to exploit them. No amount of charity can change that fact, only a change in social organization can change it.