SJC Exchange Library

Originally posted by Wanda Bertram on 02/11/2025

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Hi friends,

As you all know, remarkably little government data exists to measure the mass incarceration of vulnerable groups, such as people experiencing homelessness. In a briefing released today, we've filled some of the gaps, by providing the first national estimates of how many unhoused people are booked in local jails every year.

Our 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.

• Compared to the general population, unhoused people spend an inordinate amount of time in jail, with average jail stays as much as 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.

We note in the briefing that 4.5% of people in jails is likely a significant underestimate, since many unhoused people may choose to list an address when they are booked and jails must proactively identify them as being homeless. Nevertheless, our analysis puts numbers to an urgent problem - cities and towns saddling unhoused people with criminal records that make it even harder to escape homelessness and poverty.

I hope this is useful in your work.

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Wanda Bertram
Communications Strategist
Prison Policy Initiative