The good news is that the urgency of the problem has bred numerous workable options - within a framework of limited resources - in many communities across the country.  These efforts span the criminal justice continuum, preceding arrest and continuing past incarceration and the individual's reentry into the community, and their success is often a function of the creation of partnerships, especially between the criminal justice and mental health systems.  By forming partnerships police officers on the street, booking officers in the stations, jailers, judges, public defenders, prosecutors, probation officers, prison administrators, and parole officers have created service and diversion options that support their public safety functions, and, at the same time, ensure appropriate care of people with mental illness who come into their systems. Along with mental health providers, these partnerships may also include housing agency officials, substance abuse treatment providers, business owners, families, and people who themselves have a mental illness.  Identifying and engaging others with a stake in the problem builds a support network for its solution.  Partnerships create a framework for moving forward.  They help identify community strengths and resources as well as deficits and needs. Most important, perhaps, a community partnership becomes a single voice that demands attention and appeals convincingly for assistance needed to solve the problem.

The extent to which a partnership at the community level changes systems depends on the extent to which leaders emerge at the state level.  State legislatures raise and appropriate money.  They write laws that affect who gets into the criminal justice system and how they are treated.  Public mental health systems are administered and funded at the state level, so decisions made there affect every community statewide.  If the criminal justice system's encounters with people who have mental illness are to be changed, community partners and state policymakers must work together.  This report should be exceptionally helpful in that regard.