For more than fifteen years, Washington has treated homelessness as a housing problem. Give people a home, the theory goes, and everything else will sort itself out. The results are in, and in one federal program, more people now leave by dying than by getting back on their feet.
Devon Kurtz, Director of Public Safety Policy at the Cicero Institute, has spent years making the case that the theory was wrong from the start. He sits down with Nick to explain why so many people living on the street are drug addicts, psychotics, or repeat offenders first and homeless second, how a broken criminal justice system keeps cycling them back into encampments, and why the conservative movement helped build that system just as much as the left did.
Then he makes the case for something almost nobody in Washington will say out loud: it’s time to bring back the asylum.
Read our Homelessness in America study guide with Cicero: https://americanmoment.org/study-guides/homelessness-in-america/
Follow Devon: https://x.com/dkurtzz
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