Unharmful gentle soul locked up - Rachel Kushner story

Rachel Kushner has a good story in current New Yorker, 57, a brief account of the sad life course of a man with significant mental disabilities, a horrific childhood, who becomes part of the homeless scene in the underpasses in and around LA, picked up for vagrancy of some sort  - and then his life careens along the downward spiral that so many prisoners endure (or don't) - an all too believable story the inevitable consequence of how we as a society treat the homeless (assuming criminality when in fact they may suffer from mental disorders and addictions, and prison is the worst outcome), the incarcerated, and the recently released in particular, with no support services whatever. Kushner's story is sadly credible and probably based on some pretty intensive research as the experiences recounted - the progress, or regress, from county jail to the frightful Pelican Bay - must be far from Kushner's own immediate experience. What's particularly impressive is how she manages to tell this in close 3rd person, so that we almost vicariously experiences the stumbling thought process and jumbled memories of the protagonist - the story seems confused and confusing for the first few paragraphs, much as he experiences life outside of the prison, and his decline is inevitable: mistreatment by cops and prison officials, victim of bad counsel and bureaucratic mishandling, victim of neglect. What's particularly sad and scary is how he blindly accepts the prison code of carrying out orders, even to kill - he can't see any way out of his predicament nor does he care. At the end, brutally transported in a cage to the most notorious of California prisons, he strangely pauses to observe the pelicans before getting locked away and without question to face much more serious abuse for the rest of whatever his life will be.