Five Charts That Explain the Homelessness-Jail Cycle—and How to Break It

A jail or prison stay can lead to the loss of a person's job and housing and sever their personal connections, leaving them without supports after their release. People with conviction histories also face discrimination in housing and employment that can prevent them from finding a home and stable job, leaving homelessness as their last resort.

More than 50,000 people enter shelters directly from correctional facilities a year, according to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. That figure doesn’t include the unknown number of people who are forced to live outside immediately after incarceration or who enter shelters after a period of instability following incarceration.

Furthermore, the risk of homelessness increases for people with multiple convictions. The Prison Policy Initiative found that people who have been incarcerated more than once are 13 times more likely than the general public to experience homelessness, whereas people who have been incarcerated once are 7 times more likely. Although these data are available only for people incarcerated in prisons (not jails), they show how people cycle between incarceration and homelessness.

Beyond harming people’s well-being and failing to connect them with housing and services, the homelessness-jail cycle is also costly for taxpayers. In Denver, where Urban is evaluating the city’s supportive housing social impact bond initiative, a person experiencing long-term homelessness in 2016 had 24 contacts with police over 90 days, including four citations, one arrest, one jail stay, and 18 other kinds of contacts, such as being ordered to move along. This 90-day period cost the city nearly $4,000 and represents the experience of just one person among the hundreds in Denver stuck in the homelessness-jail cycle.

Denver previously calculated that providing safety net services to 250 people experiencing long-term homelessness and cycling in and out of jail and other emergency services cost the city an average of $7.3 million a year. And Los Angeles found that people experiencing homelessness accounted for $65.5 million in jail costs and $5.6 million in booking fees in the 2014–15 fiscal year.

The pandemic has transformed how police interact with people experiencing homelessness. Many cities have reduced their jail populations to lower people’s risk of exposure to the coronavirus, and police are making fewer contacts and arrests. In Denver, after COVID-19 hit, police contacts with and arrests of people experiencing long-term homelessness and frequent arrests fell significantly. Between March 11 and March 31, police had eight fewer interactions a day on average with people in this group compared with the same period in 2019, according to the Urban Institute. Urban used a regression analysis of 2019–2020 Denver Police Department data that controlled for daily weather, day of the week, month, and year.

Responses to COVID-19 show that communities can change their law enforcement practices. But as communities respond to and recover from the pandemic, they can go beyond temporary disruptions of the status quo and consider permanent changes to how they address homelessness. To make their communities’ COVID-19 recoveries more equitable and sustainable, local leaders can stop using punitive tactics that trap people in homelessness-jail cycles and implement evidence-based Housing First strategies that help people access the housing and services they need to achieve stability.