Saber-rattling about homelessness is nothing new for America’s mayors, but Eric Adams has escalated this rhetoric dramatically in the past couple of months. The mayor of New York is using genuine concern over the plight of unhoused people with mental illness to launch a new round of police sweeps, this time with a twist: people whom the police judge to be severely ill and incapable of caring for themselves will be involuntarily hospitalized. Demands to expand involuntary treatment and involuntary hospitalization are also coming from California.

The United States has barely any public mental health infrastructure, and as a result people with mental illnesses are often shunted into the prisons or onto the sidewalks. The largest mental health facility in the United States is the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in Los Angeles. Meanwhile the number of unhoused people with severe mental illness is often inflated, but nevertheless tragically high: at least 25 percent of those forced to live on the street have a diagnosis of a severe mental illness, and many more likely qualify even if they’re undiagnosed.

People across the political spectrum understand that our current system is ineffective, though they bring different levels of compassion to their analyses of the situation. Conservatives are primarily concerned with disappearing populations that they consider to be a nuisance and a menace. Most liberals understand that leaving people to suffer on the streets is inhumane, while treating people in jail is more expensive than simply doing so in a hospital — and both are profoundly traumatizing. But despite their differences, conservatives and liberals are increasingly united in their calls to return to the bygone era of mass involuntary hospitalization.