Local jails, which hold one out of every three people behind bars, have become America’s misguided answer to problems faced by the most vulnerable people, like poverty and homelessness. Despite jails’ central role in mass incarceration, comprehensive national data about the 5.6 million people who cycle through them each year is collected infrequently, leaving even basic questions about jails unanswerable. Fortunately for researchers, advocates, journalists and many others, the Jail Data Initiative is collecting 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.
In this briefing, we present what we know about unhoused people who are booked into jails, using the best available dataset, collected from jail rosters by the Jail Data Initiative (JDI). (Last year we published our first analysis of JDI data, focused on repeat bookings; we intend to publish additional analyses this year.) We find that people booked into jail who were marked as unhoused at intake are held for longer than average, while being handed some of the lowest-level charges like trespassing or petty theft.