Crime and violence among mental patients.

The authors studied the arrest rates of 867 patients from the Bellevue catchment area who were discharged from the psychiatric division of Bellevue Hospital. They found that the arrest rates of these patients for two years preceding and two years following their admissions to the study were higher than the arrest rates for the general population of the Bellevue catchment area as well as those for 4,601 cities in the United States. They discuss the implications of this finding for the post discharge care of mental patients, particularly in the light of current discharge policies.