Subject: Press Release: Prison Policy Initiative’s Analysis- Jailing the homeless: New data shed light on unhoused people in local jails
Press Release
For Immediate Release through March 1, 2025
Subject: Prison Policy Initiative’s Analysis- Jailing the homeless: New data shed light on unhoused people in local jails
Contacts:
- Sacramento Poor People’s Campaign, at SacPPC2019@gmail.com
- Decarcerate Sacramento, at decarceratesac@gmail.com
- Prison Policy Initiative, at Wanda Bertram at wbertram@prisonpolicy.org
“While it is well known that jails are often used to warehouse vulnerable people on the margins of society, remarkably little data exists to measure this problem. In a briefing released last Tuesday the Prison Policy Initiative fills some of the gaps, by providing the first national estimates of how many unhoused people are booked in local jails every year.”
The Prison Policy Initiative’s analysis draws on data collected by the Jail Data Initiative, a project scraping public data from local jail websites to enhance understanding of who is behind bars. We identified 175 jails in JDI’s dataset that noted at least one unhoused person in their rosters from July 2022 through July 2023 and analyzed the collective population of those jails to produce our estimates. Key findings include:
- 4.5% of jail bookings in our sample were of unhoused people, amounting to over 22,000 bookings over the course of a year and 15,000 unique unhoused individuals. If we apply these percentages to total jail bookings nationwide, an estimated 205,000 unhoused people go to local jails every year — nearly one-third of the number of people experiencing homelessness on a single night in 2023.
- Compared to the general population, unhoused people spend an inordinate amount of time in jail, with median jail stays 2.5 times longer than the overall jail population and more frequent re-bookings over the course of a typical year.
- Unhoused people are most commonly booked on low-level charges such as trespassing, petty theft, and drug offenses— charges that reflect cities’ eagerness to punish people for their homeless status.
- Black people and people over 55 make up a disproportionate number of unhoused people booked in jails. For Black people in particular, these numbers reflect disproportionate rates of homelessness and poverty in the non-incarcerated population.
The briefing notes that 4.5% of jail bookings is likely a significant underestimation, since many unhoused people booked in jails may choose to list an address and jails must proactively identify them as being homeless. The overall analysis puts numbers to a problem of great moral and fiscal cost — cities and towns saddling unhoused people with criminal records that make it even harder to escape homelessness and poverty.
“This crucial new report reinforces what we know to be true through our lived experience and those we advocate with inside Sacramento County’s jail system,” said Melanie Williams, Organizing Fellow with Decarcerate Sacramento. “For years, we have collected similar data locally, urging county officials to prioritize housing to stop the revolving door of incarceration. Unfortunately, they are still considering expanding jails instead of homes.”
Join Decarcerate Sacramento, the Sacramento Poor People’s Campaign and other concerned community members Wednesday, February 26th, the Board of Supervisors revisits the jail expansion plan. Join us in making public comments against any form of new jail construction and for full cancellation of the Main Jail expansion project.
For more information or to RSVP for the February 26 Mobilizing Against the Main Jail Annex Project please visit: bit.ly/Feb26Mobilize.
Our collective message must be keeps our communities safe: by investing in community services, affordable housing, and violence prevention programs. Not new jail buildings!!
The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival has picked up this unfinished work. From Alaska, Arkansas, California, the Bronx, Sacramento and to the border, people are coming together to confront the interlocking evils of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, militarism and the war economy, and the distorted moral narrative of religious nationalism. The Campaign understand that as a nation we are at a critical juncture — that we need a movement that will shift the moral narrative, impact policies and elections at every level of government, and build lasting power for poor and impacted people.
Prison Policy Initiative: The non-profit, non-partisan Prison Policy Initiative produces cutting edge research to expose the broader harm of mass criminalization and then sparks advocacy campaigns to create a more just society.
For more info please visit: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2025/02/11/jail_unhoused_bookings/
https://jaildatainitiative.org/
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