are to the individual. Health services provided in jail or prison are limited but costly. For example, New York City pays more than $115 million a year to provide health and mental health services to jail inmates.25 Another important element of any comparison of the costs of diversion with those of not diverting people with mental illness is the costs of processing the case. Long before a person with mental illness is sentenced to incarceration, taxpayers begin paying the costs of the police who arrest and process the person; the court pens where the person is held; the defense attorney who represents the person; the Assistant District Attorney (ADA) who prosecutes the person; the judges the person appears before, as well as their staff and court officers; the rent, maintenance and overhead of the courthouse; the jail where the person is detained; transportation to and from the jail, et cetera. Diverting a person with mental illness out of the criminal justice system at an early stage, for example prior to arrest or at arraignment, saves not only the cost of incarceration, but many of these costs as well. Finally, any cost comparison is incomplete if it does not consider the future fiscal consequences of the decision to divert or not divert a person with mental illness from the criminal justice system into treatment. Many of the people with mental illness in New York's criminal justice system are caught in a "revolving door" that shuffles them repeatedly through hospitals, jails and shelters at an enormous cost to taxpayers. One authoritative estimate places the annual cost of serving a seriously mentally ill homeless person caught in the revolving door of repeated hospitalizations in New York City at about $70,000.26 An individual passing repeatedly through hospitals and the criminal justice system may cost even more. If diversion from the criminal justice system into community mental health services creates an opportunity to engage th...
