The USA has a lot of room to improve for sure. But solutions that work for Finland, which is a small, ethnically homogeneous, high trust society, simply won't map to the USA which is the opposite of all those things.
It won't map because of our national obsession with crime and punishment. I'd bet dollars to donuts that it's far cheaper to put a drunk in a homeless shelter AND give him treatment (AlAnon, etc) than it is to lock him in a cage with a herd of sociopaths. But the Prison Industrial Complex has got to look out for its own, after all.
I agree with everything you said except for this. The idea that many/most/all prisoners are violent or sociopathic is a myth propagated by those who stand to benefit from the prison industrial complex. Prisoners are human and prisons are inhumane. For another take, here's the IWW IWOC[0]:
> Incarcerated people are legally slaves as per the 13th Amendment which abolished "slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime". We are legally slaves. If you've been to prison you'd know we are treated like slaves.
Billions are made annually off our backs. Outrageously priced or grossly inadequate privatized 'services' like health care, food, phone calls, assault our humanity - they feed us like animals, suck our families dry, and when sick leave us to die. The government spends as much as an elite college tuition per person to keep each of us incarcerated, but this money does not develop us as human beings, reduce crime or make our communities safer.
I wasn't making any claim to the tendencies of many/most/all prisoners. My point was that putting non-violent petty offenders in jail/prison puts them in the path of a concentration of sociopathic people, those who really should be kept out of society.
The intention isn't so much crime and punishment as is the justification. The need to reallocate idle citizens producing no economic value is the systemic reason to high prisoner count domestically. America's prisons are largely forced labor camps recycling rebellious, able-bodied men into a working, productive labor force. One local example for me is paying californian prisoner's $1/hour to fight forest fires in the American west.
Sure these solutions would work. Institute free universal healthcare paid for through the tax system, spend money on empowering women and helping families with children (including family planning), and make education free up to and including college.
To finance it, tax the rich, dismantle 4/5ths of the US military and stop fueling wars overseas.
But that's called socialism and is (unlike actual treason) treated like it would be high treason by the US political parties; mostly because they are all in the pockets of wealthy donors who would not like this new regime.
You can’t force people to accept treatment in US. While these might slow growth of the homeless population in dire need of medical help, it won’t prevent it.
To have no homeless, you have to have both resourcing for housing/medical, but also be willing to use force to compel those unwilling to get treatment/be housed where they have little choice. That’s a very tough leap to make.
The choice part never made sense to me - why would anyone want to live like that? But, as a society we value free will and therefore must respect the choices we do not agree with.
You don't generally have to force folks to get help. We (the US) do it in a small portion of the population: Severe mental illness, dementia, and substance abuse. They aren't talking about forcing folks to do things. You can encourage folks to do such things, though.
Most folks don't actually want to live like that, but some really do want to shun society. You can offer folks things like primitive cabins to help them shun society. Substance abuse, mental illness, and job loss are real problema with real solutions. Heck, if you can't solve someone's substance abuse or alcoholism, you can at least make sure they have shelter and food available to keep them safe even if they won't pay for such things. For a single person, it doesn't have to be luxurious: A dorm setup with private bathrooms and shared kitchen can work out.
