A recent video clip from WWMT underscores what many on the ground already know: our courts were never designed to handle psychiatric crises. They were built to adjudicate, not to treat.
Yet time and again, people with mental illness are funneled through Michigan’s legal system misunderstood, underserved, and often incarcerated instead of helped.
The Problem Isn’t New, But It’s Getting Harder to Ignore
Michigan has mental health courts in some counties. But access is limited, eligibility criteria are strict, and capacity is far too small to meet the need. If you don’t meet the clinical threshold, or if your charge doesn’t “qualify,” you’re back in the general system and you’ll be facing a judge, looking to score points within the community for reelection, or make a Board of Commissioners happy, with no clinical support and no options.
In other words, unless you’re lucky enough to fit the exceptionally narrow profile for a problem-solving court or mental health court, the system, especially in punitive rural counties like Barry, defaults to incarceration.
Michigan Still Lags Behind
While some states have invested in crisis stabilization units, expanded psychiatric beds, and mobile response teams, Michigan continues to rely heavily on jails and emergency rooms to absorb mental health needs. Community Mental Health (CMH) agencies often turn people away if they’re not deemed “severe enough,” while court dockets swell with people in obvious distress.
The result is a system that criminalizes symptoms and cycles people through incarceration instead of care.
What Needs to Happen
The short answer? SO MUCH. But the biggest solution is to stop wasting money on police and spend the money on mental health resources. Some other options include:
- Expanding the reach and funding of mental health courts so they are not limited to select jurisdictions or case types.
- Funding community-based treatment models like Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) and Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) statewide.
- Implement Crisis Response Teams (CRTs) rather than using police to respond to mental health emergencies, so people in mental health crisis are met with care and not cuffs.
- Ensuring judges and court staff receive proper training in identifying and de-escalating psychiatric crises, especially in rural counties like Barry that over-incarcerate and under-treat.
We cannot continue to act surprised when people with unmet clinical needs end up in court. The real surprise should be that we ever thought this was justice in the first place.
Love what we do? Support Clutch.
