Touted by the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office (SFSO) as “California’s first law enforcement-led crisis stabilization center,” RESET holds people who’ve just been arrested for public intoxication or being under the influence of a controlled substance. They are detained until staff give them a certificate declaring that they’re able to care for themselves, after which they can voluntarily stay for up to 23 hours. Earlier in 2026, an internal city memo obtained by Mission Local warned that RESET carries a “very high legal risk” of being classified as a jail or a detention facility.

The facility is located in the South of Market (SoMa) neighborhood, and only accepts detainees from District 6, which also includes the Tenderloin. Black residents comprise less than 10 percent of the population in those neighborhoods, while white residents comprise a little over 27 percent. But at publication time the dashboard shows that a little over half of the 984 detainees admitted so far were white, and a little over one-quarter were Black, meaning Black people are being the most disproportionately detained.

RESET is located directly across from the primary intake facility for the county jail system, and San Francisco Sheriff Paul Miyamoto has stated that RESET’s benefits include “easing the strain on our jails.” But a litany of conditions make many detainees ineligible for RESET, including the administration of Narcan, active warrants, psychiatric criteria, and possession of controlled substances and/or personal property above a certain threshold.

According to a San Francisco Civil Grand Jury report published in June, 95 percent of people “held in the SFSO jail are charged with felony crimes, while typical misdemeanor-only arrestees without warrants are booked and released within a day or so, many before they are assigned a bed.” RESET’s existence may encourage officers to arrest people they might otherwise have left alone.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved RESET in early 2026 by a vote of 9-2. Both the supervisors who voted against expressed concerns that there wouldn’t be any tangible way to measure the impact of the center.

MAKING AN IMPACT: Take a sneak peek into the #RESETCenter. And take a look at the #sfsheriff new online public dashboard- which has real-time insights into admissions, outcomes, and how the program is helping individuals in crisis while allowing law enforcement officers to get… pic.twitter.com/ajqPvmhAER

— SF Sheriff’s Office (@SheriffSF) July 8, 2026

RESET represents the city’s first performance-based contract for services related to public health and homelessness. This doesn’t refer to how RESET impacts the city, but to how much the city pays to Connections Health Solutions, the Arizona-based for-profit contractor operating the program. Connections is receiving a flat monthly rate between $528,339 and $657,018 during 2026, after which the rate will be $555,797, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. But it can make up to an additional 12.5 percent by hitting certain performance metrics, including linking more than 30 percent of detainees to services and keeping the officer drop-off time under eight minutes. Data show it takes approximately five minutes for officers to turn someone over to RESET staff and return to their other duties.

Cops in San Francisco as well as elsewhere in California are more likely to stop Black residents over outstanding warrants compared to white residents. Black residents have significantly more prior arrests and convictions than their white counterparts due to this long history of unequal stops and biased enforcement. They are also more likely than whites to be referred to involuntary psychiatric holds, carceral practices rooted in longstanding clinical-racial bias.

Citywide, Black residents comprise only around 5 percent of the population; white residents, around 37 percent.

San Francisco was redlined in 1937, with immigrant neighborhoods like SoMA graded “hazardous” to justify mortgage denials and economic underinvestment. This legacy continues today. An April civil rights complaint filed by the SOMA West Neighborhood Association alleges that the city treats the area as a “containment zone” for poverty, while protecting the city’s wealthy West Side neighborhoods.

In 2024, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors formally apologized to Black residents for “systemic and structural discrimination” and “targeted acts of violence,” committing to the “rectification and redress of past policies and misdeeds.” Yet earlier in 2026 as the city was getting ready to launch RESET, it cut $57 million from the Department of Public Health budget—gutting harm reduction and HIV services, and vital programs serving Black, Brown and trans communities.

A “jail-alternative” like RESET is yet just another arm of criminalization and surveillance targeting Black residents.

Image via San Francisco Sheriff’s Office/X

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In 2021 Cicero produced a model bill, which legislators across the country have copy-pasted to become law, that calls for expanding the criminalization, surveillance and incarceration of people who live on public land. Cicero is the brainchild of Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale, who has written at length about his entrepreneurial interest in the “successful, beneficial prison.” In the lead-up to the summit, Housing Not Handcuffs published a memo highlighting the institute’s financial ties to industries that profit from its carceral agenda.

Cicero’s model bill criminalizes public camping as a misdemeanor, punishable by up to one month in jail and a $5,000 fine. It coerces unhoused people into so-called structured camping facilities, state-run sites that could include forced psychiatric and/or substance use treatment as well as mandatory drug testing, with carceral or financial penalties for “failing.” Cicero has also been a loud opponent of Housing First, the permanent supportive housing approach without preconditions like abstinence. The model bill proposes to redirect funding from Housing First to “treatment first” models and unhoused detention camps. Cicero-inspired legislation has been enacted in 10 states.

The summit also follows the Louisiana Senate’s passage of HB 211, arguably one of the harshest such bills in the country. This Cicero bill would force unhoused people to “choose” between incarceration in jail or involuntary treatment. If they can’t afford the cost of that treatment, they may be forced to perform unpaid labor.

Housing First had a 20-year run and $4 billion a year. The federal government just killed it.

This will change homelessness in every city in America – including yours.

Housing First activists sued over the last attempt at major reform. But this time, they’ll have an uphill… pic.twitter.com/ACRYTq1iMm

— Cicero Institute (@InstituteCicero) June 3, 2026

The new research brief from Housing Now Handcuffs highlights Lonsdale’s ties to an organization called Social Purpose Corrections. While SPC is billed as a nonprofit, Lonsdale’s vision includes profitability.

“Believe it or not, not everyone involved in prison policy thinks profit is dishonorable,” the tech billionaire and Trump campaign donor wrote in a 2024 blog post, “certainly not myself.” 

The brief also details how Lonsdale’s venture capital firm, 8VC, invests in various companies that profit from tech surveillance, prisons and policing, including from Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. Through 8VC, Lonsdale also backs Citizen, an app that turns neighbors into vigilantes to report suspected crimes—often falsely. The brief shows Lonsdale’s connection to Gothams LLC, a company profiting from immigration detention facilities in Texas and Florida.

“That’s really what this is always about: the money,” Antonia Fasanelli, executive director at the National Homelessness Law Center, told the crowd at the June 5 protest. “This is not a policy debate about how to end homelessness. This is someone who plans or intends or maybe stands to get rich off of the lives of unhoused people.”

Lonsdale’s dystopian vision is gaining ever-deeper traction within the Trump regime. On June 4, Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee released their 2027 funding priorities, which will almost certainly exacerbate the affordable housing crisis. Appropriations Committee Ranking Member Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) said that the GOP bill, which slashes funding for public housing by $1.3 billion, will “put hundreds of thousands of low-income households at risk of eviction.” 

NEW REPORT Research has found that the Cicero Institute, a right-wing think tank pushing anti-homeless laws, has deep connections to the prison and surveillance industries, and may stand to profit from the same anti-homeless laws they advocate for. https://t.co/Eo5iMGdV1e

— National Homelessness Law Center (@homeless_law) June 3, 2026

Cicero’s influence in that bill is apparent. The think tank’s fingerprints are also all over Trump’s 2025 anti-unhoused executive order. In 2024 as SCOTUS considered Johnson v. Grants Pass, Cicero submitted an amicus brief in support of cities criminalizing people sleeping outside. 

After a Cicero-inspired law was enacted in Kentucky, 178 people were charged with unlawful camping in just one county alone.

“In Kentucky, we’ve seen the dangerous legislation of the Cicero Institute incarcerate our people every day,” VOCAL-KY executive director Shameka Parrish-Wright told the protesters gathered June 5. “We know that generations … will be impacted by bad legislation and the things that groups like Cicero Institute are pushing.”

Donald Whitehead, representing the National Coalition for the Homeless, told the crowd that Cicero’s policy platform was an “old American pattern,” recalling how Jim Crow-era vagrancy laws targeted Black people “for being poor, unemployed or simply unhoused,” so that they could be “funneled into convict leasing and forced labor” that “powered local and state economies.”

“We can’t ignore that today’s policymakers once again are trying to make human survival a crime and call it public policy,” Whitehead said.

Image (cropped) via Arizona Judicial Branch

Correction, June 8: A previous version of this article misstated Donald Whitehead’s last name.

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The DOJ will be able to designate VA lawyers as special assistant United States attorneys, which gives them the authority to initiate guardianship proceedings in court. 

“Guardianship and conservatorship are among the most extreme legal interventions that can be imposed on a person,” the Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund stated March 12. “They can strip individuals of the right to make their own medical decisions, control their finances and direct their own lives. These are not routine protective measures—they are sweeping losses of civil rights that are notoriously difficult to reverse.”

The agencies claim the highly unusual collaboration is meant to “help some of America’s most vulnerable Veterans get the ongoing care they need.” But funneling those veterans into guardianships is yet another mechanism that the Trump administration has created in service of the 2025 executive order calling for disabled people who live outside to be removed from public view. The DOJ/VA announcements obliquely acknowledge that the population the MOU applies to “includes some Veterans who are either homeless or at risk of homelessness.”

“I am possibly headed to be one of these veterans at risk, and my ex-husband is already there,” Army veteran and trauma coach Angela Peacock told Filter. “With no next of kin or family support, many in my generation could easily land ourselves in a position like this.”

Following deployment in Iraq, Peacock had a nightmarish experience of seeking trauma support through the VA system and being overly medicated with psychiatric drugs. Today, she guides others seeking relief from similar heavy medication cocktails on how their prescriptions can be safely reduced or discontinued.

“It is true that veterans without family or support who can’t make their own medical or financial decisions need help doing so,” she said. But “prolonged institutionalization can contribute to persistent depressive symptoms and diminished agency.”

The DOJ and VA are using the legal tool of guardianship to tackle a longstanding issue: veterans receiving inpatient care for complex physical and mental health conditions, especially those who lack family or appointed healthcare proxies, often languish in VA facilities with no clear path to discharge.

The special attorneys who will be assigned to these cases do not represent the veterans, but rather the VA and DOJ, whose stated goal per the MOU is to “ensure the efficient use of VA medical resources.” This creates a conflict: in their most vulnerable moments, veterans may depend on government attorneys who could view guardianship primarily as a means to free up hospital beds, rather than as a last resort.

The agencies are “sidestepping the law … through a process riddled with conflicts of interest,” House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs Ranking Member Mark Takano (D) stated March 11. “VA should not be both the caregiver responsible for veteran’s wellbeing and the legal driver of stripping veterans of their rights.”

 

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Unhoused veterans, particularly those who are physically disabled, have long described the labyrinthine journey they were forced to take when attempting to access stable housing. On Reddit threads discussing the MOU, many posts expressed fears of predatory guardianship and a state-sponsored grab of their benefits. 

“Imagine being wards of the VA and having to do whatever they want,” a Redditor identifying as a Navy veteran posted in the r/VeteransBenefits subreddit March 11. “No choice on whether you are going to take that pill or not. Basically become government property all over again.” 

“As a former homeless vet, and with the way things are going, possibly homeless again in the next year, this is absolutely terrifying,” another Redditor wrote March 12. 

Some pointed out how housing, mental health care and food banks have previously been deemed too expensive to fund, yet somehow a forced guardianship program is feasible. Others predicted that the guardianships will inevitably be outsourced to private contractors who will choose the veterans’ housing while they “accept and invest the compensation payments on [their] behalf.”

A member of the U.S Army W.T.F! Moments public Facebook group summed up the prevailing mood about the MOU: “What’s the worst way this can be used against veterans? That’s the question everyone should ask.”

Veterans’ service organizations have practical solutions to the problem that the federal government intends to bludgeon with guardianship. In a March 13 statement, the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) called on Congress to pass the End Veteran Homelessness Act of 2025 (HR 1957), which rather than removing rights from the most vulnerable veterans would provide them with case managers to help them navigate the housing system.

One day after the DOJ/VA announcement, ProPublica dropped a bombshell report on an exodus of VA mental health care providers, hundreds of whom have left since President Donald Trump began his second term. The regime has similarly slashed protections for veterans who are unhoused or at risk of losing their housing.

“They’ll get them off the streets and put them into housing (camps), and declare the homeless veterans crisis over,” another Redditor posted March 11. “Will anyone actually be helped? Probably not, they just don’t want to see the homeless vets anymore.”

Image via Department of Veterans Affairs

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RESET, which will receive health department funding but operate under the authority of the sheriff’s office, is billed as an alternative to jail and hospitalization. It’s slated to operate as a pilot for 26 months with the option of a one-year extension, and to open its doors in April at 444 Sixth Street in the SoMa neighborhood, across from the county jail.

The center is expected to have 25 reclining chairs where people arrested for public intoxication can be dropped off and can remain for up to 24 hours. Then they’re supposed to be given the option to transfer to a stabilization center, where they could stay for up to 90 days while receiving mental health and substance use services. 

Though officials have characterized the initial 24-hour period as non-carceral, the sheriff’s office has warned that “people who leave early and remain intoxicated and disorderly could be arrested again.” Connections Health Solutions, meanwhile, would receive financial incentives based on how many people are deemed sober, how many stay up to 24 hours even after being deemed sober, and how many are linked to services after the 24-hour period expires.

“The RESET Center allows our officers to arrest those using drugs in public at a speed and volume we have never seen before,” Lurie stated. “And with this new resource, we will also give those suffering from addiction a real chance to choose recovery.”

“At that point, Sheriff Miyamoto said the quiet part out loud. ‘This is what used to be called a drunk tank.’” https://t.co/rRU6AlQJg1

— Susan Dyer Reynolds (@SusanDReynolds) February 12, 2026

Earlier in February a Board of Supervisors meeting became contentious after Mission Local published a leaked memo from the city attorney’s office. 

The memo warned that the proposed facility carried “very high legal risk” because it did not meet legally mandated requirements regarding “safety checks, health care and food services.” It cautioned that people brought to RESET could sue the city for “non-compliance with standards for detention facilities.” The board still voted 9-2 to approve the RESET contract, which Lurie has now authorized.

“Let’s call it what it is,” Supervisor Connie Chan, one of the two dissenting votes, told colleagues. “People will be detained in this space and it’s not voluntary … With additional information [from the leaked memo] it makes me deeply question the operation model and its legitimacy.”

Supervisor Jackie Fielder, the other dissenting vote, noted that the $14.5 million RESET contract was inked at the same time that $17 million cuts were made to vital Department of Public Health programs. “I will not be supporting spending city funds for new sheriff’s facilities that come at the expense of community health programs,” she told her colleagues.

Supervisor Matt Dorsey, who represents the city’s SoMa neighborhood, said he was launching an investigation into the memo leak and would pursue censure of any fellow supervisor found responsible. 

According to the San Francisco People’s Budget Coalition, the $17 million DPH cuts will gut services designed for marginalized groups, including harm reduction services.

“During a budget year where we’re going to see austerity cuts to vital social services, we can’t be spending $14 million on needlessly bringing in an out-of-state entity to administer systems already in place within our city’s own Department of Public Health,” District 8 community member Evelyn Posamentier wrote in an open letter. “We have treatment services that work, but are burdened by bureaucratic barriers and underfunding. Why would we spend such a huge price tag on something that only temporarily addresses street conditions?”

Public documents show that the sheriff’s office proposed to contract with ConnectionsCA LLC, a subsidiary of Arizona-based Connections Health Solutions, which subsequently filed paperwork on October 31, 2025.

Three local organizations had initially applied. But only Connections ultimately moved forward with the process, according to a January 30 report by the city’s legislative and budget analyst. No explanation was given as to why the other organizations dropped out. 

In addition to the costs of running the RESET pilot, the report stated that over the initial term, stationing two police officers as security at all times would run the sheriff’s office an additional $4.3 to $4.9 million.

Notably, while the legislative and budget analyst’s office clearly recommended other items in its January report, it withheld a similarly clear recommendation for RESET, writing only that “[a]pproval of the proposed resolution is a policy matter for the Board of Supervisors.”

At $238,000 per bed per year, the Connections proposal was 52 percent higher than that of the lowest bidder. And because the company is new to contracting in California, it won’t be able to bill Medi-Cal for at least six months, during which time the city will be paying top dollar for a facility that’s largely focused on streamlining police operations. 

“In modern times, to spend $14 million on a dressed up drunk tank is truly a shocking waste of resources,” Jennifer Friedenbach, director of the Coalition on Homelessness, wrote in a February 3 letter to the Budget and Finance Committee.

Image via City and County of San Francisco

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In his remarks at the signing, Stein referenced the high-profile death of 23-year old Ukrainian immigrant Iryna Zarutska, who was stabbed on a Charlotte light rail train in 2025. After 34-year-old Decarlos Brown Jr. was arrested and charged with murder, media reported that his mother had previously attempted to have him involuntarily committed. The state subsequently enacted Iryna’s Law, which limits pre-trial release.

Stein spoke of the need to strengthen coordination between cops and mental health crisis responders. His speech followed a well-worn playbook wherein legislators campaign to reform behavioral health or crisis care only after a rare violent tragedy.

While experts have stated for decades that it is almost impossible to predict or prevent random acts of violence via behavioral health reform, politicians must demonstrate to voters that they are doing something about crime. Policies responding to extremely rare violent incidents will always be overwhelmingly reactive, carceral and coercive in nature. 

This document appears to be more about policing and control than improving care. It seeks to expand the co-responder model, which pairs cops and clinicians on mental-health crisis response calls.

SAMHSA’s crisis care guidelines recommend civilian teams composed of a peer-support worker and a clinician. The guidelines emphasize that “co-response teams that include law enforcement can be stigmatizing and reinforce the criminalization of mental illness,” and that overreliance on law enforcement for crisis response violates the Americans with Disabilities Act. 

North Carolina’s data show that the co-responder approach correlates with criminalization. A 2025 evaluation of Burlington’s decade-old Law Enforcement Crisis Counselor (LECC) program found that people were more likely to be incarcerated after interacting with a crisis counselor. They were also more likely than a matched comparison group to face new charges within two years of the crisis interaction.

Stein’s executive order exemplifies carceral humanist policymaking.

The executive order also calls for increasing coordination and transfers between 911 and 988 personnel. It directs the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services to develop recommendations for sharing data between the two lines “when appropriate.” The document does not define what constitutes appropriateness, nor does it discuss callers’ consent to data sharing or specify what data would be shared with whom, and why.

Such data-sharing would violate the spirit and purpose of the 988 crisis line, which North Carolina’s DHHS advertises as “free, confidential and available to everyone 24/7.” The confidentiality was meant to provide a greater sense of safety, particularly for communities of color that have been most impacted by violent, racist and ableist law enforcement responses to crisis. In directing agencies to even partially merge these systems, the executive order would undermine the diversionary purpose of 988. 

Stein’s executive order exemplifies carceral humanist policymaking that directs scarce resources towards staffing youth and adult locked facilities and prison beds, instead of expanding access to community care and prevention. The order identifies the problem as a shortage of state hospital workers and corrections officers, citing 12 out of 47 state hospital units and 3,950 prison beds that are “unavailable due to staffing shortages.” In addition to adult corrections officers, the kinds of roles it wants to fund are “youth counselors, youth counselor technicians, and youth services behavioral specialists supporting youths in the juvenile justice system.”

The executive order also acknowledges an alarming trend: Involuntary commitment petitions in North Carolina doubled from 54,000 in 2011 to more than 106,000 in 2021. Civil commitment is supposed to be a legal tool of last resort, used only in cases of clear, imminent danger. But in 2025, Disability Rights North Carolina issued a disturbing report showing rampant “misuse and overuse” of a practice that has become an “easy button” within the system. 

Elaborate political theater will make no one safer.

It’s clear the governor has listened to the cops, not disability advocates and impacted community members. On involuntary commitment, Stein bypassed strong recommendations and a demand for urgent change from Disability Rights North Carolina, his state’s own Protection and Advocacy agency. Instead, he kicks the can down the road to DHHS to convene a “working group” to recommend reforms to the involuntary commitment process.

Stein also ignores the vital advocacy of directly impacted people like PeerVoice NC’s Recovery Alternatives to Force and Coercion (RAFT) Coalition, who bring real solutions. RAFT has been conducting its own study of involuntary commitment, promoting alternatives to force like psychiatric advance directives (PADs) and voluntary peer-run respites.

And the executive order ignores the non-carceral, nationally recognized response programs that are popular with communities in North Carolina. The Durham-based Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Team (HEART) program dispatches unarmed civilian three-person teams of clinicians, EMTs and peer support workers to crisis calls. HEART evaluation data show that the program eliminates nearly all contact between community members in crisis and law enforcement, which supports decriminalization.

If the HEART program were funded and supported throughout North Carolina, it could implement its community-based approach toward ending the involuntary commitment nightmare. HEART’s approach is to have providers conduct evaluations in the community, diverting individuals away from court orders whenever possible, versus the current practice of hauling children and adults away to be evaluated, entrapping them for days within locked settings and overcrowded EDs.

Ultimately, Stein’s executive order is elaborate political theater that will make no one safer. If it accomplishes anything, it will only reinforce the carceral stranglehold on North Carolinians in crisis.

Correction, February 17: An earlier version of this article misnamed Disability Rights North Carolina on the second mention.

Image via Washington State Department of Social and Health Services

The post After “Iryna’s Law,” Behavioral Crisis Response in NC Grows More Carceral appeared first on Filter.

STREETS is billed as a $100-million investment to “solve long-standing homelessness issues, fight opioid addiction and improve public safety by expanding treatment.” It will be piloted in eight as-yet-unspecified cities, and is designed to operate in tandem with “assisted outpatient treatment” (AOT)—court-ordered psychiatric probation, similar to probation for drug violations. AOT saddles participants with the ever-present threat of being involuntarily committed to a psychiatric facility for noncompliance, or even just a technical violation. HHS will soon offer $10 million in AOT grants (though this amount has been higher in previous years). 

Kennedy now wants provider organizations to “take charge of an addict” for a period of one to three years. Providers would receive bundled payments if they ensure that the people in their custody remain in compliance with an abstinence-only model. This will prove beneficial to providers with stake in urinalysis testing—possibly the most notorious financial scheme in the rehab industry—but is not likely to result in long-term abstinence. It also incentivizes providers to employ policies that are increasingly punitive, result in misleading data, or both.

“While ICE terrorizes our families and communities, STREETS will do little to address our addictions, mental health and homelessness crises.”

STREETS furthers President Donald Trump’s July 2025 executive order titled “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets,” which was widely condemned as a declaration of war on unhoused people. The Legal Defense Fund likened it to a resurrection of the Black Codes preceding today’s “vagrancy” laws.

The Housing First model, which does not require abstinence as a precondition of access to permanent supportive housing, was created to address the failures of the “tough on homelessness” approach favored in the 1980s. Trump’s HHS has characterized Housing First and harm reduction-based programs as “misguided,” falsely claiming that they’ve been ineffective and “enabled future drug use.” This is reminiscent of proponents of involuntary commitment falsely contending that deinstitutionalization failed, when it was never fully implemented and was arguably still the most successful decarceration effort in United States history.

“While ICE terrorizes our families and communities, STREETS will do little to address our addictions, mental health and homelessness crises,” former Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration official Paolo del Vecchio told Filter, “turning away from proven harm reduction and Housing First approaches while embracing failed practices of coercion and criminalization.”

In red and blue jurisdictions alike, messaging is shifting from public health to public safety. Policymakers are expanding the reach of civil commitment laws to remove unhoused people from public view, disappeared into a vast system of coercive programs. Some fear these may include forced labor farms and detention camps.

Investment in faith-based treatment and “outcome-oriented” payment models all but guarantee increased coercion from providers.

In 2025 the White House announced its Faith Office, which supports “faith-based entities, community organizations and houses of worship” in competing on “a level playing field” for federal grants and other funding opportunities.

“Faith-based organizations play a critical role in helping people re-establish their connections to community,” Kennedy, a 12-step devotee, told the audience on February 2. The same day, Faith Center Director Monty Burks spoke at a separate, virtual event introducing STREETS to community stakeholders.

Several of the Prevention Day event speakers signaled the desire to phase out the health insurance industry’s current fee-for-service models, in which providers are reimbursed based on quantity, and instead use “outcome-oriented” or “values-based” payments that incentivize based on quality—and are still rife with inequities. The costs and administrative burdens of both approaches could be eliminated if we ditched the predatory health insurance industry in favor of Medicare for All.

Investment in faith-based treatment and “outcome-oriented” payment models all but guarantee increased coercion from providers, potentially in violation of the First Amendment. 

In January, a separate executive order establishing the “Great American Recovery Initiative” (of which Kennedy is a co-chair) warned that most people who need treatment don’t think that they do. It appears that the public is being primed for the widespread involuntary detention of unhoused people who use drugs and/or have visible symptoms of mental illness. 

“We intervene early,” Kennedy told Chris Cuomo of News Nation on February 3. “We catch people on the street and channel them into treatment, out of crisis through detox, treatment, outpatient and into sober housing.” 

Cuomo gently pushed back: “You can’t make people get treatment if they don’t want to.”

“We have a community care program that involves the courts,” Kennedy retorted. This, he said, is a more “efficient, economic and humane” approach to those who refuse services.

Image via Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration

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SAMHSA’s GAINS Center for Behavioral Health and Justice Transformation is currently taking applications for a “learning collaborative” (LC) that will provide selected candidates with subject-matter experts and technical assistance to enhance existing AOT programs in their communities, or establish new ones. Policy Research Associates, a self-described “positive social change” organization, has held the multi-million dollar GAINS Center contract since the early 1990s. 

“This LC will support teams in identifying and engaging community partners that have frequent interaction with individuals who may be eligible for AOT and are at risk of criminal justice involvement, homelessness or repeated crisis contact,” the GAINS Center stated in a December 2025 announcement. “Teams selected for this LC will work intensively to assess how AOT is currently functioning within their local and state statute and determine optimal ways to use AOT as an option for diversion, including approaches that support pre-arrest referral to community resources.”

AOT programs primarily target unhoused people with a history of drug use and/or psychiatric symptoms who have been deemed noncompliant by medical authorities. This form of involuntary commitment has been described as “psychiatric probation.” It is yet another carceral health service that reinforces structural oppression.

Organizations selected to participate in the taxpayer-funded LC will be mentored to improve their capacity to legally snatch vulnerable and marginalized people off the streets. They will skill up in coercing unhoused neighbors into civil court systems that siphon scarce resources from community-based services like permanent supportive housing.

“I thought [AOT] was involuntary at first, but then I quickly realized that it was super beneficial.”

“I thought [AOT] was involuntary at first, but then I quickly realized that it was super beneficial,” AOT program evaluator Dr. Cindy Gipson said during the opening presentation for the GAINS Center webinar.

Involuntary commitment is a cornerstone of President Donald Trump’s law-and-order approach to street homelessness, drug use and psychiatric disability. This was made clear in a July 2025 executive order and echoed in SAMHSA’s revised strategic priorities unveiled a few months later.

The practice emerged in the 1980s to correct what a number of medical authorities, cops and caregivers viewed as a pendulum that had swung just a little too far towards disabled people’s civil rights. They declared that deinstitutionalization—the movement to replace large hospital-based psychiatric treatment with smaller programs at community clinics—had failed, even though it has still never been fully implemented; JFK’s vision of community care was killed by Reaganomics. 

In the late 1990s, the Treatment Advocacy Center, aligned ideologically with right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and Manhattan Institute, began to exploit rare, high-profile murders committed by people with psychiatric diagnoses to sell their model involuntary outpatient commitment legislation to states. They rebranded the process as AOT, to make it sound more innocuous to policymakers.

Mainstream media outlets have repeated this propaganda, stoking fear and reinforcing false claims about people with “untreated serious mental illness” so that involuntary commitment has gained bipartisan support. 

Today, 48 states and the District of Columbia have involuntary outpatient commitment laws; only Massachusetts and Connecticut remain holdouts. However, many jurisdictions, such as Maryland where an AOT program was enacted in 2024, have struggled to implement these laws due to lack of funding or other structural hurdles.

In 2016, the 21st Century Cures Act established federal support in the form of the Assisted Outpatient Treatment Grant Program. Over the past decade, this program has funneled nearly $150 million to dozens of grantees to build out their courts and coercive systems.

While the Cures Act emphasized evidence-based practices, the evidence at large shows coerced and involuntary treatment to be ineffective at best, and harmful at worst. Supporting claims are often based on observational studies rather than more rigorous forms of research like randomized controlled trials—which have generally indicated that any benefits come from the expanded access to services and care, not from a court order. Research has also found consistent racism in the way AOT is implemented, with Black and Brown people being the overwhelming recipients of court orders in many jurisdictions.

In July 2025, the Government Accountability Office reported that the Department of Health and Human Services’ attempts to evaluate its own AOT program—whether it actually reduces hospitalizations, arrests or homelessness—had been “inconclusive,” citing fundamental flaws in how AOT is studied nationwide. GAO attributed the difficulties to small sample sizes, reliance on self-reported data and other “methodological challenges, many of which were inherent in the program.”

During the January 15 webinar Jennifer Honig, director of law and policy with Massachusetts’ Mental Health Legal Advisors’ Committee, asked in the chat if there would be any discussion of the GAO report’s findings. A Treatment Advocacy Center representative quickly chimed in to redirect the conversation to the “great outcomes” of other evaluations.

“I am really concerned about the idea that AOT is a less restrictive alternative to incarceration/hospitalization,” Honig told Filter. “I don’t see forcing powerful, mind-altering and life-affecting drugs on people to be less restrictive. It scares me and I would hope it would scare other people—even with all the other totally scary things going on in the US right now.”

Like jail-alternative programs for drug possession, AOT is marketed to the public as a compassionate, evidence-based public health intervention. In reality these programs are designed to disappear unhoused people while sidelining harm reduction, health care and housing justice policies that advocates have worked toward for decades.

The GAINS Center calls AOT an “early intervention.” It shouldn’t even be a last resort.

Top image depicting federal AOT grants awarded and inset graphic of AOT process both via Government Accountability Office

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On December 19, TMZ reported that Reiner had previously been diagnosed with schizophrenia, quoting anonymous sources who said a recent medication change had made him “erratic and dangerous” and “out of his head.” They also claimed drug use was worsening the symptoms. 

Dozens of news outlets, social media influencers and public figures amplified the moral panic. Many continued to rely on anonymous sources who claimed to have intimate knowledge of Reiner’s mental state. In September, Rob Reiner had said that his son hadn’t used drugs in six years, but more attention is being paid to the anonymous sources describing the younger Reiner as “a ticking time bomb” who spent his parents’ money on drugs with no remorse. 

Reiner made his first court appearance December 17, and is currently being held without bail as he awaits an arraignment pushed back to January 7, 2026. He did not enter a plea, and his attorney told press that the case involved “very, very complex and serious issues” that would have to be “thoroughly but very carefully dealt with and examined.” Speculation abounded that Reiner’s attorney planned to pursue an insanity defense, which could reduce the charges from first-degree murder to second-degree manslaughter. 

Reiner’s mental state at the time of the killings has not yet been determined, and such an assessment will likely take months. But unsubstantiated conclusions have gone viral.

“Dr. Drew” Pinsky took to cable news to promote Al-Anon and advocate for long-term confinement and criminalization. A commentator in City Journal opined that people who refuse help should be either institutionalized or “incapacitated through the criminal justice system.” California Governor Gavin Newsom’s CARE Court, marketed as the solution to houselessness, is already falling wildly short of expectations. Yet the author of a Sacramento Bee op-ed still uses the Reiner killings to argue for expanding the failing court’s powers to compel treatment. 

Such rhetoric aligns with the Trump administration’s law-and-order approach to street homelessness, escalated by his July executive order targeting harm reduction and other social services for people deprived of housing and health care.

As media analyst and co-host of the Citations Needed podcast Adam Johnson put it in 2021, whenever crisis and tragedy strike we will see pundits and politicians use them to “empower, embolden and—most importantly—fund preexisting carceral and militaristic responses.” 

Over the past decade, popular films have increasingly depicted mentally ill characters as violent. News coverage of mental health also tends to focus on violence, and link it to schizophrenia in particular.

The media and entertainment industries have long drawn on pre-existing templates when depicting drug use or mental illness. But over the past decade, popular films have increasingly depicted mentally ill characters as violent. News coverage of mental health also tends to focus on violence, and link it to schizophrenia in particular. The complex realities of interpersonal violence are drowned out by the relentless demonization of drug use and psychiatric disability. Demonization generates clicks, which generates more demonization.

In reality, people who experience psychosis, or visible symptoms of mental illness in general, are far more likely to be targets of violence than they are to be perpetrators. This includes police violence, but the media narrative around mental illness has legitimized warped policy priorities that elevate carceral, punitive approaches over investments in housing and community care. Schizophrenia diagnoses, meanwhile, are applied in such racist and punitive ways that advocates have called for abolition. 

In their 2015 semi-autobiographical film Being Charlie, Nick and Rob Reiner discussed a misplaced faith in the rehab industry. A “tough love” approach had led Michelle and Rob Reiner to send their son to 18 different facilities, including a wilderness camp in Utah, before realizing that these facilities were in fact harmful.

“The program works for some people but it can’t work for everybody,” Rob Reiner told the Los Angeles Times in 2015. “When Nick would tell us that it wasn’t working for him, we wouldn’t listen. We were desperate and because the people had diplomas on their wall, we listened to them when we should have been listening to our son.”

“We were so influenced by these people,” Michele Reiner added. “They would tell us he’s a liar, that he was trying to manipulate us. And we believed them.” 

BJ Courville, an attorney who has covered celebrity conservatorships on her YouTube channel, dedicated a recent livestream to deconstructing the narrative surrounding the Reiner killings. She critiqued the articles describing long-suffering parents of a son who refused the best help money could buy.

“A lot of times what y’all are calling help, ain’t help,” Courville told her viewers. “Controlling someone else’s medical decisions isn’t freaking help.” 

The media’s reductionist coverage of violence as solely a function of untreated drug use or mental illness is now perpetuating that same coercive system that the Reiners, and countless others, have said failed them. It will support the expansion of involuntary treatment policies that primarily target people who are Black, Brown, disabled, unhoused, trans or immigrants.

The Reiner family’s tragedy reflects a larger, collective tragedy: the continued eagerness of the media and pundit class to exploit rare, horrific acts of violence to further entrench the state’s carceral reach. 

Images of Michelle, Rob and Nick Reiner via Wikipedia

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