JUSTICE SYSTEM AND MENTAL ILLNESS Some observations

Approximately 5 percent of the U.S. population has a serious mental illness. The U.S. Department of Justice reports, however, that about 16 percent of the population in prisons and jails has a mental illness.
A study conducted in New York State found that men involved in the public mental health system over a five-year period were four times as likely to be incarcerated as men in the general population.
Inmates with mental illness in state prisons were 2.5 times as likely to have been homeless in the year preceding their arrest than inmates without a mental illness.
On average, inmates with mental illness serve a longer portion of their sentence than inmates without mental illness.
On Riker's Island (New York City's largest jail), the average length of stay for an inmate is 42 days; it is 215 days for an inmate with a serious mental illness.