Courts were never designed to handle psychiatric crises. They were built to adjudicate — to weigh evidence, assign guilt, and impose consequences. And yet time and again, people with mental illness are funneled through Michigan’s legal system: misunderstood, underserved, and most often incarcerated instead of helped. A recent WWMT video clip underscores what many on the ground already know. The system is not equipped for this. It wasn’t designed for it. And it shows.
The Problem Isn’t New, But It’s Getting Harder to Ignore
Michigan has mental health courts in some counties — and they matter. But access is limited, eligibility criteria are strict, and capacity is far too small to meet the need. If a defendant doesn’t meet the clinical threshold, or if the charge type doesn’t qualify, they’re back in the general system: facing a judge who may be more focused on reelection optics or keeping a Board of Commissioners happy than on clinical realities, with no support and no alternatives. In punitive rural counties like Barry, that default is incarceration. Full stop.
The criminal legal system criminalizes symptoms. It does not treat them. When that is the primary infrastructure a state uses to manage people in psychiatric crisis, the outcome is predictable: people cycle in and out of jails and emergency rooms, get worse, and eventually return to court. The system produces its own repeat customers and then acts surprised by the volume.
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 agencies routinely turn people away if they are not deemed severe enough, while court dockets swell with people in obvious distress. The result is a system that treats a symptom as a crime, prosecutes it, and then discharges the underlying condition untreated back into the community.
What Needs to Change
The most direct answer is to stop routing public safety money exclusively through police and start routing meaningful funding through mental health infrastructure. Beyond that shift in priorities, the specific reforms that have documented effectiveness are as follows.
Mental health courts work in the jurisdictions where they operate. The problem is that they are not available in every county, their eligibility criteria exclude most of the people who need them, and they are chronically underfunded. Expanding their reach, loosening eligibility, and funding them to scale is not optional if the goal is to stop incarcerating people for having untreated psychiatric conditions.
Assertive Community Treatment and Assisted Outpatient Treatment are evidence-based models with documented effectiveness at reducing incarceration and hospitalization for people with serious mental illness. Both exist in Michigan in limited form. Neither has statewide reach. Funding them to scale would reduce the volume of people entering the criminal system in the first place — which is cheaper, more humane, and more effective than the current cycle.
Sending armed police to respond to a psychiatric crisis is not a clinical intervention. It is a law enforcement intervention applied to a medical situation, and the outcomes reflect that mismatch. Crisis Response Teams staffed by mental health professionals should be the default dispatch for mental health calls, with law enforcement as backup rather than the primary responder. Michigan has CRT programs in some areas. It does not have them everywhere. That needs to change.
A judge who cannot identify a psychiatric crisis in a courtroom is a judge who will incarcerate someone for it. Rural counties like Barry, which have documented patterns of over-incarceration and under-treatment, need mandatory clinical training for the people making daily decisions about what happens to defendants who are visibly in distress. Reelection pressure does not substitute for clinical competency.
We cannot keep acting surprised when people with unmet clinical needs end up in criminal court. The real surprise should be that we ever decided this was justice in the first place.
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