Homeless people are most often arrested for property crimes, often trespassing, and more likely to be 55 years and over. But data within the nation's jails is elusive -- only a fraction of jails track housing status, according to Leah Wang from Prison Policy Initiative, who wrote a new briefing using data from the Jail Data Initiative, which collects present-day data from roughly 900 jails to provide a better understanding of those who are criminalized and locked up, including the approximately 205,000 unhoused people who are booked into jails each year.
The data is limited by how jail entries are created at intake -only 20% of the jail rosters (175 of 889) contained one or more entries indicating an unhoused person.
From the data available, however, Wang concludes that people who were marked as unhoused at booking are held for longer times while facing some of the lowest-level charges like trespassing or petty theft. They were also disproportionately older, age 55 and over, more likely have multiple arrests within the year.
Some of the report’s key findings from the sample of data from the 175 jails that tracked unhoused people:
About 4.5% of jail bookings in the sample are of unhoused people: Across the 175 jail rosters in the JDI dataset, there were 22,839 bookings of people known to be unhoused, out of 503,571 total bookings over the course of one year.
Property and public-order charges most common, violent charges uncommon: Though unhoused people made up 4.5% of overall bookings, they made up a much larger share (8%) of bookings where the most serious charge was a property charge and 4.8% of bookings for which the most serious charge was a drug charge.
Unhoused people were most commonly booked for a top charge of trespassing. In contrast, bookings of unhoused people made up disproportionately small shares of bookings where the top charge was “violent” (3%), or related to DUI (<1%) or criminal traffic (2.1%) offenses.
Unhoused people are more likely to be booked multiple times: More than one out of every five jailed people are booked again within a year. Unhoused people made up a disproportionate share of those rebooked, representing 4% of all unique jail bookings but 8% of those rebooked. Said another way, over 40% of unhoused people booked into jail were booked multiple times, while 20% of people who were housed or had an unknown housing status were booked multiple times.
People aged 55 and older make up a disproportionate share of bookings of unhoused people: About 10% of all jail bookings in our sample were older people (those age 55 or older), but 15% of bookings of unhoused people were older people.
Unhoused people are held in jails for longer than average: The overall average stay in jails whose rosters included at least one unhoused person was 21 days, but for unhoused individuals was 32 days — almost 50% longer.
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