December 23, 2008

Tough love for today’s hard cases

Why, a reader of last week’s column asks, are so many more people on the streets who are hard, or even impossible, to house in any conventional sense?

There used to be places for these men (and they are mostly men). Places like bush camps where illiteracy and anti-social tendencies were commonplace. The proceeds of dirty, low-skill and dangerous jobs were squandered in days or weeks, and then it was back to the bush. Their lives were less visible, and shorter.

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