We Alaskans have created a community that is often as harsh and unforgiving as the wilderness surrounding us. Despite decades of staggering oil wealth, the support systems we've created for community members who face any kind of problem that makes independent living difficult are shamefully inadequate. This failure of support allows those most in need of our help -- people who struggle with mental illness, brain damage, severe FASD, addictions born of physical or sexual abuse -- to be culled from our midst through the trauma associated with homelessness: isolation, incarceration, abuse and early death.

There have been a series of news stories over the last couple of months that, when taken together, reveal the totality of our communal apathy towards "these people" and the consequences of that apathy to their plight. I say "these people" because those with severe mental illness or cognitive disabilities who live on the streets tend not to present well, so it's easy for the rest of us to disassociate ourselves from them. Their personal hygiene may be poor, their clothes dirty and disheveled. They may rant incoherently or spit expletives at us as we hurry by the downtown transit center on our way to Kaladi Brothers Coffee or the Performing Arts Center.

According to a recent report in Alaska Dispatch News, the latest plan to deal with "these people," one being put together by the Anchorage Community Development Authority and the Anchorage Downtown Partnership, is to use rent-a-cops to shoo them out of the downtown area. A video accompanying the report follows one of the rent-a-cops or "goodwill ambassadors" as he ejects sleeping homeless teens from private property in the early morning hours, while assuring viewers that the goal of the Downtown Partnership is really to "get them help and to get them healthy again." But then he adds, "Most of these people, we see them a lot and we see them daily, and they don't want help."

Forgive me for being blunt, but that's a load. It's also the same easy excuse our community has used to absolve itself from any moral obligation to actually provide that help.

There are private nonprofits that do lift folks off the streets. My fiancee works with homeless youths at Covenant House, the only overnight youth shelter in both Anchorage and the Mat-Su valley area. Covenant House provides housing, job training and employment assistance, plus transitional living programs, to thousands of teens and young adults.

Every day Covenant House, like the two adult shelters Brother Francis and the Rescue Mission, helps people who suffer from extreme trauma, mental illness or cognitive impairments. But it's not a psychiatric facility. If a young person has an illness or disability that makes them consistently a danger to the other kids or staff, that youth may have to be discharged. I've seen first-hand the effect this type of decision causes Covenant House staff -- the agonizing, the depression -- because they know they are not discharging the youth to a facility that can provide the help the kid needs. There is none. That kid is going back to the streets.

And this is where I'd like to revisit the tragic life trajectory of a homeless youth named James Clinton. His story was covered several news cycles ago, so I'll reiterate the essential details. In 2013 a group of attackers beat him into a coma in an abandoned house downtown. For several days, he lay in urine- and blood-soaked clothes, injuries running the length of his body, in the basement at the bottom of concrete stairs.

James Clinton was a victim. He sustained the type of traumatic brain injury that made it difficult for him to control his own behavior, particularly his temper. He had the kind of injuries that necessitated a lifetime of consistent therapy and care. But our criminal justice system stops caring about victims the moment their attackers' criminal cases end.

Clinton made the news again when he was arrested himself last December, this time for killing his cellmate at the Anchorage jail. It was hardly surprising that Clinton would end up in jail, inexplicably paired with a cellmate who also suffered from mental disabilities. Jail is our default answer to those who need our help.

There are no resources in this state to help someone like James Clinton live a decent life. Alaska has no long-term-care psychiatric facility. The woefully understaffed Alaska Psychiatric Institute is treat-and-release only: People in crisis are medicated, held for a few days, then released back to the streets. The only alternative is a spotty patchwork of loosely-regulated assisted living homes. These homes are not required to either accept or provide consistent treatment and monitoring for those who -- through no fault of their own -- suffer from severe behavioral problems or mental illness. Also, astoundingly, neither Anchorage nor the Valley has a detox facility where people can withdraw from drugs under safe, humane conditions. Once again, our community's answer to those folks is jail.

Even when this state was flush with oil money, there was no public will to provide the facilities and services to help victims like Clinton. Now that our legislators are determined to slice every cent from the state budget before asking us to pay for our state government, there seems to be little hope that help will ever materialize. But we can stop the hypocrisy of discussing our homeless population as if they are a self-selected blemish on Anchorage's pretty scenery, one that can be rubbed away by downtown "goodwill ambassadors."

Let's at least have the moral courage to recognize their plight for what it really is: a mark of shame on our entire community.

Marcelle McDannel has been working in criminal law for almost two decades, both as a prosecutor and as a criminal defense attorney. She currently practices criminal defense statewide. Her crime fiction blog can be found at askmsmurder.net.