Dunston Sidner, a mentally ill crack addict who has cost taxpayers $200,000 in the past 12 years, was ordered released to parole Friday - once again to a treatment program that may not have room for him.

Sidner, 56, who was profiled in the Rocky on Friday, illustrates one of the problems contributing to the state's skyrocketing bill for prisons: half of Colorado's inmates return to prison within three years.

Colorado has a shortage of treatment programs for mentally ill parolees who are substance abusers. Such inmates are a key reason for the rising prison population and a pending $800 million bill for new state prisons.

Twice in the past, Sidner has been ordered into an intensive residential treatment program for mentally ill drug addict parolees, even though it has room for 40 of those 650 parolees. Both times, Sidner was dropped on the streets homeless, and he soon failed parole and went back behind bars.

Parole board hearing officer Celeste C de Baca on Friday said after a closed hearing that she had approved a plan that may send him to his sister's home over the weekend, and move him next week to a residential treatment center for mentally ill addicts run by Mental Health Corp. of Denver.

MHCD has two such facilities sufficiently staffed to take parolees, said MHCD chief Dr. Carl Clark. But there's a waiting list. And the state has no contract with MHCD to pay for parolees like Sidner.

"So they're competing with everybody else for these slots," Clark said.

Finding room for parolees "is really hard to do."

The jail said late Friday that Sidner was in the process of being released. But corrections officials could not say where he was headed.