Ending warehousing and building community

This seems a sensible approach to the problem, and builds on a model used by the Citizens for Independent Living in South Brunswick. Community services are cheaper, more effective and more compassionate that institutionalization.

Assemblyman Louis D. Greenwald (D-Camden) today issued a multimedia package on his legislation to overhaul the way the state cares for individuals with developmental disabilities by refocusing money from costly institutional care toward community-based services.

Greenwald’s measure (A-3625) aims to reduce the population of New Jersey’s seven
developmental centers by 80 percent within five years.

As Greenwald said during a recent press conference,

“The time has come for us to end this warehousing of human life and to give the consumers and the patients what they require, what they have asked for, what their families have dreamed of, which is the opportunity to live independently and in a way and in a means with the dignity and respect that they deserve.”