The hypocrisy and doublethink is the best part of watching these guys. They simultaneously think:
- People shouldn't be sent to prison.
- The government should be housing the poor.
Now, let's think about the government housing the poor for bit... There are a LOT of homeless people, so the government would need to create large buildings with shared apartments in them, containing just the most important things: beds and toilets. Naturally there would be a cafeteria and an outdoor mingling area.
However, there are a lot violent and mentally unstable poor people, as well as a lot of marginalized people. So, to keep them safe, these government housing structures would need designated guards to keep them from hurting each other. They'd need to make sure no weapons or drugs got inside, for safety reasons.
The obvious conclusion I'm coming to is that a large-scale government housing solution would be hard to distinguish from a prison. Maybe the biggest difference is that poor people could choose to leave and live under a bridge or die in a ditch, in which case they're back to square one. Anyone who thinks it wouldn't turn out this way just needs to look at the border camps, which the democrats keep running just like the republicans did, because that's pretty much all you can do when enough poor people make themselves YOUR problem.