Meet Marilyn Hartman, serial stowaway:
She's an unremarkable person with an interesting obsession, that she pursues beyond all rationality.
Here's a little bit that we know about her. She's from the Chicago area and but has lived extensively in San Francisco and Hawaii. She has two brothers that she is currently estranged from. She lived a fairly unremarkable life up 1990 ish and then......something switched. She was working for a law office and became aware that they were rigging cases for the federal government. She turned them in, changed her name from Marilyn Stall to Marilyn Hartman got a sizeable payout from the whistleblower case she started, and.....got a new life.
After this series of events she moved to the west coast, and picked up the worst, least controllable case of restlessness most anyone can has ever heard of. No lie, this is gonna be a textbook entry for both psychological and security training going forward. She has taken perhaps some twenty odd flights without paying, both domestic and international, and has been arrested dozens of times in failed attempts in a half dozen states. Classic social hacking stuff. She's given dozens of interviews-which makes this an easily tracked issue-but it's fair to say that if she's not in jail she's at the airport or on the way to the airport.
Marilyn is quiet, non violent and completely unable to explain or stop her hitching behaviors. Everyone involved but her considers this a mild (ish) form of mental illness. It's not a previously known or well diagnosed sort of thing and treatment appears to be …..well complicated. She can't be committed as she is not remotely dangerous, is not a minor, and when she is not in jail, does not consent to treatment. Since she isn't really a security threat-she regularly passes through all the security screening (just you know, without a ticket) thus the charges she gets hit with are not the kind of thing that keep you in jail long. Sometimes the charge isn’t even a felony-something like theft of services-what you'd get if you hopped on a bus without a ticket.
So the question that the cook county court system is struggling with is how do you treat a nonviolent, non-dangerous mildly mentally ill person without their consent(besides you know, electing them president)? There is no real answer right now-and maybe there is no solution in a free society. But it's an issue that affects literally thousands and thousands of Americans.
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