Advocates are urging New York State to stop treating prisons as mental health facilities and instead invest in community-based care for Black and brown people living with mental illness. This urgent message was delivered at a packed panel discussion titled Shadow of the System: Understanding Racial Disparities in the Mental Health and Criminal Legal System , held Wednesday at the Brooklyn Central Library that featured public health and prison reform experts who traced the current crisis to deep-rooted systemic failures from slavery to mass incarceration.

Many of the speakers urged the state to pass the Treatment Court Expansion Act , which expands alternatives to incarceration for people with mental illnesses.

"...it's important to me to bring awareness to the ways in which our socie

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