This article was originally published in Community Impact on May 16, 2025. The Meadows Institute has partnered with Fort Bend County to create the Behavioral Health Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, which would extend crisis services to incarcerated individuals to further divert them from returning to the county’s jail…
Shedding a light on the trauma of intergenerational incarceration JULY 26, 2024 As a trial court judge in Georgia’s most populous county, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert C. McBurney knows that the American justice system concerns itself with the…
This article was published by Austin’s KXAN on February 21, 2024. AUSTIN (KXAN) — The Texas Juvenile Justice Department will receive a grant of nearly $1 million to help reduce youth incarceration rates, according to a release from Sen. John…
Institute’s Yolanda Lewis discusses transforming the culture of crisis response at Chicago Bar Association
Pretrial detention is a high-risk time for individuals with mental illness, and suicide remains one of the leading causes of death in U.S. jails. “Over half of the people in jails are detained on a pretrial [basis]; they have not…
This morning we kicked off Engage & Excel 2022 both virtually and in-person to an enthusiastic audience in Plano, TX. Below are highlights from our morning kickoff and a few of today’s Breakout Sessions—deep dives into some of today’s most…
RIGHT Care stands for Rapid Integrated Group Healthcare Team. It started in 2018 after a study from the Meadows Mental Health Institute found the number of mental health-related calls increased by 18 percent from 2012 through 2015. The report also…
An alliance between Betty Hardwick Center and the Abilene Police and Fire departments to bring better response to mental health issues worked 1,654 calls for service in its first year. Its primary goal is to stop clients from cycling between behavioral health…
Members of the Texas Tech Mental Health Initiative stressed the importance of mental health services in Lubbock Monday as a new report showed a need for care in the community. The group announced they would be forming the West Texas…
If you call 911 in certain neighborhoods in Dallas, a licensed specialist at the dispatch center will determine if the call relates to a mental health crisis. If it does, it won’t just be the police that respond to the…
The first time Andy Keller met David Brown, Brown was still chief of the Dallas Police Department. Keller went to headquarters to talk about his expertise: public policy as it relates to mental health. Brown and Keller partnered on an…
In response to numerous requests from Texas counties for guidance on the operation of jails during a pandemic, the Justice Policy Team at the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute (MMHPI) developed a March 24, 2020 white paper which was widely…
All too often, police officers are the first people to interact with people who are suffering a mental health crisis. That’s why MMHPI has long been committed to helping pioneer new approaches and programs that both improve the methods police…
A North Texas police research program hopes to increase its reach statewide by partnering with police departments across the state. The Caruth Police Institute announced a partnership Tuesday with the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute to revitalize and expand its…
The University of North Texas at Dallas and Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute (MMHPI) have united to transform the Caruth Police Institute (CPI) into one of the premier police training, policy analysis, technical assistance and research organizations in Texas and…
The Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute (MMHPI), Dallas FireRescue Department (DFR), Dallas Police Department (DPD), and Parkland Health & Hospital System today announced the launch of the Rapid Integrated Group Healthcare Team (RIGHT Care) pilot program, which will provide a…
For decades, a best practice of health care systems reform has been to reduce higher-cost emergency health care by promoting more cost-effective primary care aimed at prevention and early intervention of illness and disease. It is time to eliminate the…