Homelessness and crime in the United States have intertwined since at least the 17th century, when Elizabethan era poor laws regulated vagrancy through forced labor and incarceration. In a more contemporary context, a systematic examination of the intersection between homelessness and crime covers three areas. The first addresses the range of situational factors and personal characteristics that render homeless individuals more vulnerable to becoming involved with the criminal justice system. Second, homeless advocates have charged that many jurisdictions respond to homelessness by criminalizing various aspects of homeless living in an effort to drive homeless persons out of sight or out of town. Finally, just as increased risks of arrest and incarceration are endemic to being homeless, being involved in the criminal justice system and, in particular, being incarcerated increase the risk of experiencing homelessness. This entry provides a detailed overview of the relationship between homelessness and crime and examines policy approaches designed to interrupt this relationship.
Criminal Justice Involvement Among the Homeless
According to estimates by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 564,708 people were homeless on a given night in 2015. A review by Margaret Eberle reported that, depending on the homeless population studied, between one fifth and two thirds had a criminal history. Another review, by Health Care for the Homeless, reported that between one quarter and one half of homeless populations studied had a history of incarceration, with the large majority having been jailed rather than imprisoned.
Single adults, who comprise roughly two thirds of the overall homeless population, are particularly vulnerable to interactions with the criminal justice system. As a group, single adult homeless are disproportionately poor, undereducated, male, Black and Hispanic, and have high rates of mental illness and substance dependencies. Independent of any homelessness, these groups are also more likely to become involved with the criminal justice system.
Situational factors related to being homeless create an increased vulnerability for criminal justice involvement. A lack of housing leads to more time in public spaces and to more arrests for minor offenses such as public urination or drunk and disorderly conduct. Given that homelessness, almost by definition, involves extreme poverty, homeless people will be more likely to engage in subsistence crimes such as shoplifting or trespassing when they attempt to sleep in abandoned buildings and other private property. The logistics of being homeless often lead to missed court appearances and the inability to pay tickets, citations, or other legal costs, meaning that low-level offenses escalate into warrants and to additional fines and jail time. Substance abuse, which is common among homeless persons, often involves engaging in criminal acts involving possession and distribution-related offenses. Beyond drug-related offenses, only a small proportion of the homeless milieu habitually engages in more serious criminal activity. Finally, there is drift among persons with criminal records who, as they age, typically become less criminally active but also become more vulnerable to homelessness.
Criminalization of Homelessness
Local policies, laws, and ordinances that specifically address homelessness are often the means by which homeless persons come into closer contact with the criminal justice system. This criminalization thesis (i.e., the idea that people are arrested by virtue of their homelessness) is consistent with more general frameworks that describe the control of offensive populations as a key function of law enforcement. John Irwin’s Jail (1985) illustrates how this process applies to indigent urban populations, and classic studies of homelessness such as Egon Bittner’s “The Police on Skid Row” (1967) and James Spradley’s You Owe Yourself a Drunk (1970) illustrate how homelessness has historically been criminalized.
In a more contemporary context, jurisdictions that use ordinances to curtail certain behaviors (e.g., panhandling, sleeping in public) and restrict feeding programs for the homeless have been accused of criminalizing homelessness. Such approaches, critics contend, use a criminal justice– oriented process to remove homelessness from the public view or to harass homeless persons and prompt them to leave the jurisdiction. These measures are often the target of lawsuits against jurisdictions for infringing upon the civil liberties of the homeless and punitively addressing poverty. These legal tactics in turn are criticized for concentrating and fomenting crime among the homeless. Mike Davis illustrates this in City of Quartz (1990), in which Los Angeles’ Skid Row serves as a proto-reservation created by a police policy to contain the homeless, thereby creating what he called “the most dangerous ten square blocks in the world” (p. 233).
Recently, the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty has been in the forefront of an effort to frame the criminalization of homelessness as a concerted trend rather than an aggregate of local policies. Alternately, researchers such as Eoin O’Sullivan, writing about conditions in Ireland, describe the criminal justice system as but one of an array of institutional responses that function as agents of social control in response to perceptions of homelessness as menacing, unruly, or otherwise undesirable. Some localities employ an alternative approach that takes a more social services–oriented approach to law enforcement among the homeless. An example of this is in Washington, DC, where Jennie Simpson describes how police officers partner with homeless outreach workers to provide alternatives to arrest for getting homeless persons off of the streets.
In contrast to the widely held view of homeless persons as perpetrators of crime, less attention is given to the disproportionate degree to which homeless persons are victims of crime. While homelessness draws a disproportionate amount of police attention, this does not translate into a greater degree of personal security. Laura Huey, in Invisible Victims (2012), makes the most extensive examination of how homeless persons routinely are assaulted, robbed, exploited, and otherwise victimized; further, she shows the human costs related to policies that relegate destitute, powerless people, many with vulnerabilities such as disabilities, old age, and substance abuse, into the most unsafe urban areas.
Incarceration, Reentry, and Homelessness
Most research on the intersection between homelessness and crime has focused on criminal activity among those who are homeless. A smaller body of research suggests that incarcerated populations also experience disproportionately high levels of homelessness both before and after their incarcerations. Some studies have found that up to 15% of incarcerated populations were homeless in the year prior to entering jail (as compared to 1–2% of the general population). Those with a prior history of homelessness face the highest risk of homelessness upon release, but homelessness is a more general concern faced by many persons leaving jail or prison and reentering the community.
Release from prison often follows extended periods of incarceration in distant locations. This can attenuate the community and family ties that are necessary for successful reentry into the community. Poor work histories and the stigma of a criminal record make establishing economic self-sufficiency by legitimate means more difficult. In the absence of this, maintaining stable housing will require support from family, social service agencies, faith-based organizations, or other parties interested in facilitating a smooth transition for the released individual. However, many persons return from prison to communities where these resources are underfunded and overwhelmed by demand. This sets the groundwork for a variety of undesirable outcomes to reentry from prison, including homelessness.
Persons serving longer jail sentences will have similar reentry issues as their imprisoned counterparts. However, even short-term incarcerations (the median jail stay is 1 day) disrupt lives and interfere with the ability to maintain employment and housing. Releases from jail often come as abruptly as entries into jail, involving logistics where persons are often released at odd hours and with no arrangements made for post-release planning. This is a particular problem for persons with psychiatric disabilities, where such unplanned releases exacerbate psychiatric symptoms and complicate resuming community-based medication and treatment regimens to the point where court orders in cities such as New York have mandated more deliberate release protocols. Moreover, few jails provide more than minimal services to link those who are released to needed community services.
According to the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, these circumstances lead to nearly 48,000 people who enter shelters each year coming from jails or prisons. According to prior research, 11% of a group released from prison in New York subsequently entered a shelter. Rates for homelessness among those released from jail are lower; however, more persons exiting jails will become homeless because many more people cycle through jails than prisons. More broadly, Claire Herbert and her colleagues found that, among parolees released from prison in Michigan, the number of those who were unstably housed greatly exceeded those who were literally homeless. Homelessness, in turn, increases the risk of subsequent reincarceration.
These problems with community reentry threaten to become worse as the mass incarceration trends that began in the 1970s show signs of reversing, which means that greater numbers of individuals face the prospect of being released from prison and overwhelming the sparse supply of reentry services. While it is too early to say this definitively, the looming decarceration process is a phenomenon that stands to have an impact on homelessness in a manner comparable to the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill that occurred in the latter part of the 20th century.
Housing, Crime, and Homelessness
Housing is the most basic response to ending homelessness, and evidence shows that, along with ending homelessness, stable housing leads to reduced numbers of arrests and incarceration (i.e., jail and prison) episodes. Among other reasons, housing reduces an indigent person’s visibility to law enforcement, reduces the need for subsistence crimes, and facilitates attachment to the community. Housing, when combined with supportive services, can also help persons navigate and overcome the myriad of pitfalls that confront a person who has experienced homelessness and has an arrest record, especially if he or she has also experienced a period of incarceration.
The predominant approaches to housing homeless persons who have been in the criminal justice system are known as housing first and progressive engagement. The latter represents the traditional approach to rehousing ex-offenders, often the basis of treatment approaches by halfway houses and other similar long-term transitional facilities. Here, housing and an array of therapeutic services are provided in a highly structured environment where the participant gains increasing levels of independence as he or she progresses through the program. Alternately, the housing first approach is the model most prevalent in housing programs that target homeless individuals and involves a process whereby a person is provided immediate, independent housing arrangements and access to supportive services as he or she feels necessary. Housing first and progressive engagement represent two fundamentally different approaches, and proponents of each are often at odds with each other. Regardless of the merits endemic to each approach, there are inadequate supplies of both housing types, and such housing is most often provided in small boutique programs that have as of yet not been scaled to the extent required to meet demand, especially if there will be a substantial increase in the number of persons released from carceral facilities.
Beyond housing, efforts to reduce the involvement of homeless persons with the criminal justice system usually involve some measure of diversion to social services and behavioral health (including drug treatment) systems in lieu of either arrest or the standard adjudication processes. More broadly, there have also been suits filed on behalf of homeless populations seeking to strike down laws and policies that plaintiffs argue unfairly target homeless persons.
Final Thoughts
Throughout history, homelessness and crime have been overlapping phenomena. A by-product of homelessness is an increased vulnerability to arrest and incarceration, and, conversely, insufficient levels of economic or social supports upon release from incarceration carry an increased risk of homelessness. Due to absence of any deliberate, systematic policies to either divert homeless persons from the criminal justice system or substantially increase availability of housing as a function of the criminal justice system, there is little prospect that the dynamics underlying this relationship between crime and homelessness will abate any time soon.
References:
- Bittner, E. (1967). The police on skid-row: A study of peace keeping. American Sociological Review, 32(5), 699–715.
- Davis, M. (1990). City of quartz: Excavating the future in Los Angeles. New York, NY: Verso.
- Eberle, M. P. (2000). Homelessness—Causes and effects: A review of the literature (Vol. 1). Vancouver, Canada: British Columbia Ministry of Social Development and Economic Security. Retrieved December 28, 2015, from http://www.housing.gov.bc.ca/pub/Vol1.pdf
- Herbert, C. W., Morenoff, J. D., & Harding, D. J. (2015). Homelessness and housing insecurity among former prisoners. Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 1(2), 44–79.
- Huey, L. (2012). Invisible victims: Homelessness and the growing security gap. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press.
- Irwin, J. (1985). The jail: Managing the underclass in American society. Berkeley: University of California Press.
- Metraux, S., Roman, C. G., & Cho, R. S. (2008). Incarceration and homelessness. In D. Dennis, G. Locke, & J. Khadduri (Eds.), Toward understanding homelessness: The 2007 national symposium on homelessness research (pp. 9.1–9.31). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
- National Healthcare for the Homeless Council. (2013). Incarceration & homelessness: A revolving door of risk. In Focus, 2(2). Retrieved December 28, 2015, from http://www.nhchc.org/wp-content/uploads/ 2011/09/infocus_incarceration_nov2013.pdf
- National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. (2014). No safe place: The criminalization of homelessness in U.S. cities. Retrieved from http:// www.nlchp.org/documents/No_Safe_Place
- O’Sullivan, E., & O’Donnell, I. (2003). Imprisonment and the crime rate in Ireland. Economic and Social Review, 34(1), 33–64.
- Simpson, J. (2015). Police and homeless outreach worker partnerships: Policing of homeless individuals with mental illness in Washington, DC. Human Organization, 74(2), 125–134.
- Spradley, J. P. (1970). You owe yourself a drunk: An ethnography of urban nomads. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press.