No Access to Justice: Breaking the Cycle of Homelessness and Jail

By Madeline Bailey, Erica Crew, and Madz Reeve

On any given night in the United States, more than 550,000 people are experiencing homelessness.1 Among these, approximately 96,000 are chronically homeless, meaning they are facing long and repeated episodes of homelessness that make it increasingly difficult to return to housing.2 This crisis is perpetuated by a legal system that criminalizes survival behaviors associated with homelessness, fails to account for the ways in which people who are homeless face impossible odds within the legal process, and then releases them back into the community with even more obstacles than they faced before.3 Confirming this cycle, researchers have found that homelessness is between 7.5 and 11.3 times more prevalent among the jail population, and in some places the rate is much higher—for example, in San Francisco, California, a 2013 survey found that between 10 and 24 percent of people in jail identified as homeless at the time of arrest.4 Because of punitive laws and enforcement practices, people who are homeless are 11 times more likely to be arrested, nationwide, than those who are housed.

New York: Vera Institute of Justice, 2020. 19p.