Despite initial opposition, outpatient care for the mentally ill came to replace hospitalization as a standard form of care. However, the current argument by certain corrections professionals and the public against alternatives to imprisonment echoes the previous concern over releasing the mentally ill to community care. Of those guilty of lawbreaking in Kansas, 98 percent are released and only 2 percent are imprisoned. This fraction overcrowds decrepit, outmoded, inefficient, and expensive State prisons and county jails. The governor and the corrections secretary propose a new prison to provide for the overflow and to improve management and programming for the prisoners. Yet experts agree that 75 percent of those detained would be better off if they were selectively released on probation. Concerned citizens' groups call for improving the penal system through community care and local responsibility for distributing and supervising the caseload. In order to resolve this conflict, it is recommended that a panel of expert out-of-state consultants meet with the governor to discuss immediate and long-range policies. The staff of the Kansas Diagnostic Center should screen several hundred occupants of the Lansing and Hutchinson Prisons to select individuals whose past records, personality structures, hometown environments, and prison behavior records warrant release on parole. A restitution law should be enacted to correct the imbalance between innocent victims and locked-up offenders. Additional well-trained probation officers are also needed. Finally, the State should study existing alternatives to incarceration, such as the work release projects found in Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota.