SCOTT HANSON: "Ask the BIG Questions!"

EP5: Start Screaming (Minds On Trial)

Eric Smith knows the system from the inside. He's lived it, survived it, and spent years working to change it. The final episode of Minds on Trial returns to Eric's story — this time looking forward. Smith argues that the mental health and criminal justice conversation has been too cautious for too long, and that the evidence for what works is too strong to keep presenting politely. The researchers, judges, and advocates who've spent decades in this space agree: it's time to stop treating this like a quiet policy debate.

EP4: The Inside (Minds On Trial)

Eric Smith was living out of his car, certain he was a federal asset standing between the world and a World War III assassination plot. That was a decade ago. Today, he's an international consultant and a mental health commissioner. Episode four of Minds on Trial — the most personal of the five — tells Eric's story from the inside out: through Eric's own words, through his parents, and through the judge who refused to let the system write him off.

EP3: The Miami Model (Minds On Trial)

Twenty-five years ago, Judge Steve Leifman wasn't trying to start a massive reform. He was just trying to solve what was right in front of him. What followed became one of the most studied criminal justice experiments in America: arrests cut by more than half, police shootings down over 85 percent, an entire jail closed. Episode three of Minds on Trial travels to Miami-Dade County to find out what happens when a community decides to treat mental illness as a medical problem instead of a criminal one.

EP2: The Solution (Minds On Trial)

What if a judge, a psychiatrist, a social worker, and an attorney all showed up for one person in crisis - before things got worse? That's Assisted Outpatient Treatment, and in Texas, it's now the law. Episode two of Minds on Trial goes inside the courtrooms of Bexar and Tarrant Counties to hear from the judges using it. It also sits down with the architect of the Texas legislation that made it possible. Originally aired on KACU 89.5 - Abilene, Texas' NPR station.

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.