EP1: The Problem (Minds on Trial)

For sixty years, America made a choice: when someone with serious mental illness fell into crisis, the response was a patrol car, not an ambulance. The first episode of Minds on Trial traces how the nation's jails became its de facto psychiatric wards, and what that decision has cost in dollars, in lives, and in human dignity. Researchers from Texas Tech, Miami-Dade County, and the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute explain how we got here, and why the system kept producing the same results. Originally aired on KACU 89.5, Abilene, Texas's NPR Station.