Written by Michael Lewis on April 1, 2026
Advertisement
If Miami-Dade’s mentally ill who cycle year after year through crime, then jail and then homelessness were voters, the county would long ago have opened its $51 million mental health center designed to end both that cycle and the cost of jailing them.
Our streets would be safer. Our justice system would cost less. And some wasted human lives – who knows how many? – would become more productive, healthier and happier.
But this fringe mentally ill group who make up a substantial share of the jail inmates that we pay handsomely to guard and feed cannot hire lobbyists to urge commissioners to do the right thing by opening a mental health center to divert them from jails and make as many of them as possible productive.
There is no proof how many of these people treated in a mental health center rather than warehoused in jail would actually break the vicious cycle of mental illness, crime, jail and homeless, but we do have proof of one thing: just locking up mentally ill minor criminals with no treatment as we do today has yet to save a single soul.
We can’t do worse by them or our community than we are doing today.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Yet that’s what our county government is doing.
The 181,000-square-foot Miami Center for Mental Health and Recovery was certified for occupancy in 2023. Physically, it’s set to start treating patients.
It’s designed to provide crisis stabilization, residential treatment, outpatient care and diversion services for people with serious mental illnesses and substance abuse disorders. The site is ready. Operators are chosen. The game plan is set. The first 30 months won’t cost the county a cent in taxes. It’s geared to become a national model.
What’s not to like in that?
Nobody will guarantee to fully finance operations at least five years out, that’s what. With no guarantee of the future, commissioners say, this facility with everything going for it isn’t going anywhere.
Oh, they love the concept, they proclaim. Every commissioner praises it to the skies, but there aren’t seven votes in a 13-member commission to open the doors, attack the cycle of mental illness and jail, and end the county’s own cycle of inaction.
Commissioners explain that they’re being fiscally prudent, not adding services that would cost taxpayers money we don’t have locked in for at least five years into the future.
That reason would be credible if the commission took the same show-me-the-money approach to everything. But it doesn’t. Only in this case.
Why?
Nobody is saying why this differs from every other call for county spending, why we’re fiscally more conservative when dealing with a fringe of society with few friends and little power.
But in a February hearing, Commissioner René García offered to make an amendment to the plan for the mental health center “to make sure we have a true public-private partnership and bring some private providers to try to fill some of the other beds [beyond the 75 already in the center’s pilot program] that we have, other floors that can treat not only the severely mentally ill population but also have access to individuals in the community and work with other providers in our communities.”
In other words, this center would open if it switched health providers and changed its target from diversion of the jailed population of the mentally ill. As for the providers already chosen to run the seven-story center, Mr. García said, “I’m not necessarily sure that they’re the right fit for it.”
Observers have over the years watched as large Miami-Dade contracts became tug-of-war prizes pulled this way and that by competing bidders, with some projects stalled for years until the “right” contender was handed the contract – or until two firms each got a big piece of the pie. The contract for a new county waste-to-energy facility is a current example. It would be hard to count all the lobbyists involved in that deal.
Would changing the center’s focus and bringing in different operators as Sen. García suggests better serve us? Nobody has shown that.
What is clear is that the county has a lingering problem with a solution ready to go. We throw away a capital investment every day we leave the site empty. The county decided long ago on the proper path.
A rational solution would be to open the center now as planned, monitor performance as planned (with the University of Miami’s Department of Health Sciences geared to oversee costs and economic savings), spend no county money on the center for two years as planned, and only then – based on performance – decide whether to shift operators or focus.
Keeping the mentally ill in jails without treatment that we could provide at no county cost today is holding people hostage to a business deal to benefit other providers, not the community.
Leaving the mental health center closed is trying the same failed method over and over, akin to insanity.