The Costs of Homelessness

 A friend recently expressed the opinion that an appropriate response to law breaking by homeless individuals would be to lock them up and throw away the key.  The Supreme Court is about to weigh in on the issue.

It appears, judging from court records that a sizable portion of the homeless population is already incarcerated, though not with a sentence of perpetual incarceration.

Ethical and constitutional issues aside, there are some practical issues with jailing as a solution to homelessness and associated burdens to society.

Looking at just the economics, the average cost of locking up a person in Albuquerque is about $124 per day.  That amounts to $3,720 per month.  Homeless people have illness and death rates much greater that of the general population, so the monthly cost of incarceration may be quite a bit higher for homeless individuals than the average.

Another practical consideration is the current state of the City's capacity to manage the incarcerated population.  In spite of a robust recruitment effort the City prison system is perpetually understaffed, currently with around a 25% deficit.  It seems like policies that would greatly increase imprisonment rates would make an already difficult situation close to impossible.

The current Albuquerque budget for dealing with homelessness is $25 million per year. I do not think that includes the current costs for the incarceration of homeless individuals. In any case, the money expended clearly has not made any real impact on the magnitude of the problem.

It seems like using the funds currently appropriated for dealing with homelessness and incarceration might be better spent on just supporting housing initiatives. Aside from getting people off the streets, housing would greatly decrease the usually minor offenses like trespassing that often lead to incarceration of the homeless.

 UPDATE:

The New Republic has some interesting comments on the unavailability of affordable housing.  It turns out that that financial speculation is at the heart of the problem:

...In 2018, corporations bought one out of every 10 homes sold in America, according to Dezember, who notes that, “Between 2006 and 2016, when the home ownership rate fell to its lowest level in fifty years, the number of renters grew by about a quarter...”