LINCOLN PARK, N.J. - A few miles off the highway in this secluded town stands a sprawling nursing home that has become a virtual annex to New York state's psychiatric system.

Confined on the third floor of the home, which has no mental health credentials and has been admonished by New Jersey officials for providing inadequate care, are more than 125 people who were sent there by New York state psychiatric hospitals.

Locked away at a similarly checkered nursing home near a cornfield in Andover Township, N.J., are more than 200 other former New York psychiatric patients.

Still others have been sent by New York to problem-ridden nursing homes and adult homes as far-flung as the Boston area, including several deemed so violent that Massachusetts officials threatened to close them. At one last year, a resident from New York gouged out the eye of another resident with his bare hands, the officials said.

Over the past eight years, Gov. George E. Pataki's administration has been exporting hundreds of its most troubled psychiatric patients to other states, turning over responsibility for their care to homes that have little if any expertise and often have tarnished histories, according to interviews with officials, visits to the facilities and an analysis of Medicaid and other state records.

Many of those patients had been institutionalized for decades and were among the most difficult and costly to treat. As a result, they had frequently been rejected by private facilities in New York because of the level of care that they need, records and interviews show.

By using homes in other states, New York officials have shifted the burden of overseeing their care. In doing so, interviews show, New York has made it difficult for some of its own residents to re-enter the state's mental health network.

"The point was to clear beds and to get even these chronic patients out who had been taking up beds for 10 or 15 or 20 years," said Dr. Alvin Pam, who was director of psychology at Bronx Psychiatric Center until the end of 2000. "Patients might be turned down by 15 residences in New York - which could raise serious questions about whether they should be discharged at all. And if the hospital would find someplace to take the patients outside the state, they would go."

The patients have been sent by state hospitals across the region, records show, from Bronx Psychiatric Center and South Beach Psychiatric Center in Staten Island to Hudson River Psychiatric Center in Dutchess County and Rockland Psychiatric Center. The out-of-state homes, in turn, have reaped hundreds of millions of dollars from the New York Medicaid program, which typically pays for the residents' care.

A spokesman for the New Jersey Department of Human Services said the department's mental health director complained to New York officials this year that New York psychiatric patients were being discharged to nursing and adult homes in southern New Jersey, deteriorating and then ending up in a New Jersey state hospital.

Roger F. Klingman, a spokesman for New York's Office of Mental Health, which operates the state psychiatric hospitals, called sending the patients out of state proper.

"Discharge decisions are made on a case-by-case basis," Klingman said. "It's a clinical decision made by the discharge team at each state hospital. Different facilities offer different kinds of programs. Obviously, the discharge planners believe that these out-of-state facilities offer the kind of programs that the patients needed."