The Homelessness Problem We Don’t Talk About
Date Posted: August 27, 2018
Posted In: Ideas,
From CityLab: The punishment for a crime doesn’t necessarily end when the person has been released from prison.
Formerly incarcerated people face multiple barriers to securing housing (including public housing) and employment, which can lead to homelessness. And just by virtue of being homeless—by having to sleep on a bench or take shelter under a bridge—these people may then be targeted by the police. Thus starts an unrelenting cycle, through which people are tossed back and forth between jail and the street.
A new report by the Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) presents some troubling numbers on this phenomenon. Using a Bureau of Justice Statistics survey, for which the last available year of data comes from 2008, it found that among formerly incarcerated people, the rate of homelessness that year was 10 times that of the general public.
“The results from our study illustrate the connection between criminalization and an issue that we rarely discuss, but one that has profound societal costs: homelessness,” said Lucius Couloute, the author of the report, via email. “When formerly incarcerated people are 10 times as likely as the general public to face homelessness … it suggests the ultimate public policy failure. It suggests that prisons in the United States aren’t helping people reintegrate.”
Certain subsets of the formerly incarcerated people are more likely to be affected by homelessness, his analysis finds—women of color, those who’ve recently been released, and those who have had multiple spells in prison, for example.