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If all goes according to plan, the city will soon begin shutting down Rikers Island. For New York’s huge — and growing — population of prisoners with mental illness, this should be welcome news. After years of shocking revelations of abuse of sick prisoners, within a decade we will have newer, smaller — and hopefully safer — jails in each borough.

But without a comprehensive reform of how the city deals with mental illness, the overhaul risks recreating the same problems that gave Rikers such a bad name.

This is not a minor issue. Today, Rikers is one of the three largest providers of psychiatric care in the country. (The other two are also not hospitals or clinics but jails: the LA County Jail in Los Angeles and the Cook County Jail in Chicago.) At any given moment, more than 40% of its population has a mental illness; around 10% have a serious mental illness.

And while the overall population has dropped, the proportion of people with mental illness keeps going up, from about 30% in 2010 to more than 40% today Meanwhile, people with mental illness spend on average twice as long in jail as other prisoners.

In its “road map” for closing Rikers, the city has laid out 18 strategies to make the criminal justice system “smaller, safer fairer.” But it provides only two strategies specifically aimed at mental illness: finding non-jail alternatives for sick people and building more psychiatric units for those who end up behind bars anyway.

These two approaches are woefully insufficient for a challenge this big. But the city shows insufficient seriousness about making even them happen. The result will be ever more lives falling between the cracks.

Take Kyle Muhammad (not his real name), a man I’ve followed for several years. I’ve met and heard stories of many like him; attorneys and social workers in the city, too, say his story is fairly typical. If there’s something unusual about Muhammad’s experience, it’s that he’s smarter and more driven — and thanks to his very dedicated mother, has a better support system —than many in his position. Many are in much worse shape. When I met him at Rikers in 2015, he was several months into what would end up being a nearly two-year stint there. And like nearly everybody who is held at Rikers, this was before he was ever tried or convicted.

An African-American man in his mid-50s, he developed schizophrenia as a teenager. With medication, he had been able to go to college, help raise two daughters, and hold down jobs as a school-bus driver, EMT and janitor.

But like many with mental illness, whenever his medication was interrupted, his life fell apart. He’d been in and out of psychiatric hospitals and jail, too — mostly on low-level misdemeanors like turnstile jumping and selling loosies.

This time, he was charged with assault. The cops said he pushed over an elderly woman. Muhammad said he knew the woman and accidentally knocked her down when he greeted her.

What nobody disputes is that Muhammad was off his medication in the weeks and months leading up to the incident. The day before his arrest, his mother had gotten a mental health warrant — a piece of paper that would allow him to be hospitalized against his will. Ironically, with the warrant, the NYPD would have been responsible for delivering him to the hospital.

Yet the NYPD officers who stopped him for the incident with the old lady arrested him instead.

The city has promised to build at least two drop-off centers, crisis facilities where a person in a mental health emergency could be brought instead of being taken to jail. But the city still has not broken ground on them. In jail, not surprisingly, Muhammad’s mental health deteriorated. After more than a month there, at one of his first court appearances, he had a meltdown in front of the judge, yelling about his lawyer and the violation of his Constitutional rights. Court officers dragged him, kicking and screaming, out of the courtroom.

The judge ordered what’s known as a 730 exam, to see if he was competent to stand trial, but he had to spend another four months waiting to get evaluated. While better than some states, where wait times can extend months or longer, in New York City, it takes, on average, 43 days to complete an evaluation; there are currently 186 people waiting for a mental health competency exam here.

If a person is found incompetent to stand trial, there are sometimes further delays in getting treatment at the forensic psychiatric centers at Kirby or Mid-Hudson. The city is working to speed up the process; a new pilot program is testing ways to make it more efficient.

Muhammad, meanwhile, grew sicker. His mother told me about traveling to Rikers to bring him a shirt at Rikers to wear at a court date. When it turned out that the color she’d brought — white — was forbidden for security reasons (some corrections officers’ uniforms include white button-down shirts), he made a fuss so big that officers escorted him out of the visitors’ room.

When Muhammed was finally admitted to Kirby in 2014, it took six more months for him to be restored to competency — that is, made sane enough to stand trial — during which time his case was put on hold.

New York’s “roadmap” calls for diverting more sick people out of jail and finding ways to reduce the length of stay for