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.

By Christopher Herring

This report details the effects of criminalization on the homeless residents of San Francisco. Since 1981, San Francisco has passed more local measures to criminalize sleeping, sitting, or panhandling in public spaces than any other city in the state of California.1 During this same period, the United States has experienced the greatest expansion of its jail and prison system under any democracy in history. This expansion has primarily affected the poorest members of this society.2 This report documents and analyzes the impacts of the rising tide of anti-homeless laws in our era of mass incarceration on those experiencing homelessness in San Francisco. This portrait of the impact of criminalization on homelessness in San Francisco is based on a citywide survey of 351 homeless individuals and 43 in-depth interviews carried out by volunteers at the Coalition on Homelessness and supervised by researchers at the UC Berkeley Center on Human Rights. It also analyzes data on policy, citations, and arrests received from the San Francisco Police Department, the Sheriff ’s Office, the Human Services Agency, and the Recreation and Park Department. The report provides an in-depth analysis of each step in the criminalization of homelessness—from interactions with law enforcement, to the issuance and processing of citations, to incarceration and release.

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  The study makes evident how criminalization not only fails to reduce homelessness in public space, but also perpetuates homelessness, racial and gender inequality, and poverty even once one has exited homelessness. The aim of this study is to provide sound empirical data on the impacts of the criminalization of homelessness in San Francisco, while also giving voice to the experiences of those whose housing status results in their regularly being processed through the city’s criminal justice system. Our hope is that these findings will inform public discussions and provide the basis for thoughtful policy approaches to these issues.

San Francisco: Coalition on Homelessness, 2015. 86p.

By Christopher Herring

Over the past thirty years, cities across the US have adopted variants of “quality-of- life” policing. Central to these efforts have been local ordinances aimed at curbing visible poverty, suppressing “anti-social behavior,” and removing the homeless from public space. My dissertation examines the causes, practices, and consequences of criminalizing homelessness in the contemporary metropolis. By relating ethnographic observations in the political and bureaucratic fields with those between interactions of state officials and homeless individuals, the dissertation reveals novel forms of the criminalization of poverty, tracing how homelessness is turned into a criminal activity by state classifications, institutional transformations, and populist politicization thanks to, rather than in-spite of, provisions of welfare and rhetoric of assistance. It also uncovers novel forms of the penalization of poverty, disclosing how policing can be directed by urban change, economic organizations, community groups, and agencies of poverty governance tangential to the criminal justice system. Expanding the conception of the criminalization of poverty, which is often centered on incarceration or arrest, the study reveals previously unforeseen consequences of move- along orders, citations, and threats that dispossess the poor of property, create barriers to services and jobs, and increase vulnerability to violence and crime.

Berkeley: University of California, Berkeley, 2020. 142p.