There was a story recently in The Indianapolis Star about the murder of 54-year-old James Reese, a homeless man with a long history of drug & alcohol abuse and arrests, after he was attacked in his wheelchair by a cellmate in a county jail.

His death saddened those who knew him. Byron Davenport, a resident of Indianapolis who first met Reese playing baseball and basketball before both went on to attend the same high school in the late 60s, remembered him back then as having an affable outgoing person with great athletic abilities. It was when he got involved with a gang at school, and started consuming drugs and alcohol, that he reportedly went off the rails.

For the next thirty years after leaving high school he was constantly arrested for disorderly conduct and public intoxication, living and begging off the streets when he wasn’t in jail. During this time he was offered various opportunities by people and organisations that dealt with the homeless and drug & alcohol addictions, but spurned many of them.

U.S. Congresswoman Julia Carson was one such person who tried, this in 1994. As a trustee at the Center Township, a poor relief agency, she arranged for him to be given a prosthetic leg; Reese had lost a leg after a shooting incident back in the early 80s. With the assistance of Byron Davenport, who had been working for Carson, they succeeded, after what was a yearlong effort. A week later the prosthetic leg had been thrown into the trash bin of a downtown Indianapolis hotel.

Upon hearing of his death, Carson was bemused by his shunning of help:

He wasn’t a dumb person. He was articulate, he spoke well, and he had a good mind. He was just purely overwhelmed by alcohol … I think he represented a cadre of people out on the street that are so weather-beaten they resort to a life of crime. Nobody would hire him. He drank a lot. He cussed a lot. He roamed around the streets in that wheelchair. He represents the homeless of our county.

A few days before I read about the sad death of James Reese I finished off Theodore Dalrymple’s 2001 collection of essays, “Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass”, in which he expresses the near opposite view.

Dalrymple – the pseudonym of the writer and retired doctor Anthony Daniels – who worked for many years as a psychiatrist in a public hospital in the slums of Birmingham, England, as well as a physician in a nearby prison, is very much of the idea that individual volition as opposed to external forces in society is in many cases a major reason for the poor – or the “underclass” – having ended up, or at least having stayed, in that position.

In “Free to Choose“, an essay originally written for the on-line City Journal but also reproduced in the book, he explores the thesis as it applied to patients of his who lived on the street. As the title suggests, rather than ending up on the streets through circumstances largely beyond their own control, Dalrymple believes that many homeless people – along with their attending problems with drugs & alcohol – have got there through decisions freely made, even though we do not ourselves fully understand or comprehend the reasons why. Having said that, he doesn’t believes this all happens independently of society and its attitudes. Rather, he blames a society “prepared to demand nothing of them”. It is a challenging read, no matter what your views.