Pete Earley

Pete Earley brings a mixture of historical context, personal story, and investigative journalism together to create a powerful narrative. Earley's writing is earnest and intelligent and remains unbiased when writing about the mental health system. “Crazy” is a two-part creation. You have the personal narrative of the author’s experience with his son who suffers a mental breakdown interwoven with his reporting from a year observing how mentally ill prisoners are treated at the Miami-Dade County Jail. Earley followed a select number of cases through the courts tracing their progress in and out of custody, interviewing judges, lawyers, psychiatrists, patient advocates and those who suffer from mental illness, and the families and friends affected. Earley puts a face and a personal twist on the experience and trauma that is mental illness.
Earley documents how one of the Country’s largest prison has only one goal for their mentally ill prisoners: that they don’t kill themselves. The Miami-Dade County Jail has no specialized facilities for the mentally

One program Earley is Crisis Intervention Training. Earley is granted access to ride-a-long with Crisis Intervention Team trained officers, working to nonviolently resolve conflict in the community. Crisis Intervention Team training started in Memphis, Tennessee when an officer shot and killed an individual with a diagnosed mental health disorder. The incident spurred the Memphis Police Department to collaborate with the National Alliance on Mental Illness to improve training procedures for officers. Earley writes of the effect the Miami-Dade County Crisis Intervention trained officers had on the mentally ill and community as a whole, increasing officer, and community