which has funding for three years and serves as an alternative court for
those with mental illness.
The 17 who were incarcerated had substance-abuse problems in addition
to the mental illness and it was the drug addiction that resulted in
their being diverted back to the corrections system.
In the evaluation, the stress was placed not upon the number of
individuals in the program or even how many were helped, but
on the cost savings:
An analysis by the program, called Court to Community, found the first 41
participants accounted for 1,873 jail days prior to entering the program.
One year into the program, that figure for those same people had dropped to 376 jail days.
Estimated savings: Nearly $105,000 — a figure that, theoretically,
would multiply each year the participants stay out of trouble.
Enhanced mental health treatment is obviously an expensive path, but
it becomes win/win for the individual and the community when a previous
public nuisance becomes an employed productive member of the community.
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