When We Walk By by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781623178857
Publisher: North Atlantic Books

From Incarceration to Homelessness

In a groundbreaking article entitled “Return to Nowhere: The Revolving Door between Incarceration and Homelessness,” part of the “One Size Fails All” report series from the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, one of the coauthors recounts a particularly illuminating story of one woman’s experience being released from state jail:

She was scared to get out. She had just done six months on a felony prostitution charge. Her pimp had taken her to a different city to “hit licks” (commit theft) and she was arrested. He didn’t bond her out or put any money on her commissary account. On her day of release from state jail, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice dropped her off at the bus station with a ticket back to the county where she was arrested, not her hometown. When she got off the bus, she had no money, no clothes, no food, no place to go. She went to the shelter, and it was first-come-first-serve and had no beds. She immediately went to “turn a trick” just to meet her basic needs. She said that she couldn’t stand to sleep with strangers for money without getting high and found all the wrong people rather quickly: “they all hang around the bus station, it’s all right there.” She was “free” for only three days before being arrested again for prostitution and possession of a controlled substance less than a gram. She returned to state jail, only to be released again to the same situation.14

Like Timothy’s story from the beginning of this chapter, this woman’s account shows that the revolving door between homelessness and incarceration flows both ways in the United States. Nationwide, an estimated 20% of those released from prison become homeless.15 But the percentage can be significantly higher than that:16 In New York City for example, in 2017 more than half of the people released from prison headed straight to the city’s shelters upon release.17 It is hard enough for returning citizens who have a stable home and supportive family to return to post-incarceration. But for many individuals like this woman in Texas, there is relational poverty, no housing, and no real hope of getting out from under the criminal justice system.

To understand how and why so many millions of people have moved from jail and prison cells to living on the streets and in shelters, it is helpful to look at the data around incarceration rates in the United States. The numbers are staggering.

The United States incarcerates more of its people than any other developed nation in the world, by far. By the end of 2019, there were almost 6.4 million adults in the criminal justice system in the US,18 almost 70% of whom were on probation (3.5 million) or parole (880,000).19 With over 2 million people in prisons and jails in the US, if the prison population were a city, it would be the fifth-largest city in the United States, just below Houston but bigger than Philadelphia or Phoenix. The 2 million people in the US who are currently incarcerated represent a 500% increase over the last 40 years.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.