e individual and provide services that will stop the revolving door and prevent future hospitalizations and arrests, and the other costs of crime, for example, injury to victims and property damage, then diversion has the potential to save a great deal of money in the long run. It is difficult to quantify the costs of treating a person with mental illness in the community because the individual may use a variety of mental health services. The question of how much mental health services cost, and how this cost compares to that of incarceration, has not been widely studied in the past; currently, a number of jurisdictions have begun to research the comparative costs of community treatment and incarceration.27 New York State is home to a large and complex prison system composed of 69 facilities scattered throughout the state, holding about 70,000 inmates. Although prisons are distributed statewide, with relatively few located in the New York City area, 70% of state prisoners come from New York City. Although a higher proportion of New York City jail inmates are seriously mentally ill than state prisoners, the prison system is also, for many New Yorkers with mental illness, the psychiatric hospital of last resort. Last year, New York State prisons treated 6,000 inmates, or 8.7% of the state prison population, for serious psychiatric disorders.71 This figure is remarkable when compared to the fact that the entire state has only 5,800 adult patients in public psychiatric hospitals.72 A 1987 study of the New York prison system found that 15% of inmates suffered from a significant or severe psychiatric disability.73 In a system with approximately 70,000 inmates, this means that at any given time there are about 10,500 state prisoners with significant psychiatric service needs. Approximately 1,500 to 2,000 state prisoners with mental illness are released to New York City each year,79 and many of these people have no access to mental health servi...
