
Right to Fail
New York State's push to move people with serious mental illness out of large institutions was supposed to end in supportive housing and community care. FRONTLINE and ProPublica trace what actually happened: thousands ended up in unlicensed, poorly regulated group homes and cluster sites on the edges of the city, run by private operators with little oversight. Reporters interview residents, family members, and former state officials, and dig through inspection records and internal documents to show how complaints about neglect and unsafe conditions went unanswered for years. One case follows a man who died after being placed in a facility despite warnings about his care. The film lays out how a policy meant to move people from asylums into independence instead created a parallel system with its own failures, and asks why state regulators kept licensing homes with known violations. It is a procedural accounting of a system rather than a single dramatic expose, built on documents and on-camera testimony from the people who lived through it.