How a simple question about homelessness uncovered surprising contradictions in policy

The scope of my latest reporting project was intentionally narrow: I wanted to find out how many homeless people were in county jails, and approximately how much money Sacramento County spent on keeping them there.  

California is throwing money at homelessness, but public officials typically aren’t including police costs and jail costs when they account for spending on the crisis. Those numbers are elided, even though jail is one of the most expensive places to put someone. It’s pricey even without even factoring in the cost to physically transport them there, usually with public resources: the cost of the ride, the cost of the officer or officers’ time. 

Jail is also an increasingly common spot for homeless Californians to end up. In June 2024, the Supreme Court overruled a Ninth Circuit decision that had provided a measure of protection from arrest. In 2018, the Ninth Circuit had said that it was cruel and unusual punishment to cite or arrest someone for living outside if the person had nowhere else to go. Municipalities, including Sacramento, interpreted this to mean that a homeless person could not be cited or arrested under a homeless-specific violation such as illegally camping in public — unless the person had been offered an alternative shelter first. In Grants Pass v. Johnson, the Supreme Court disagreed, ruling it was not cruel and unusual to cite or arrest someone for being homeless, even in cases when they had nowhere else to go. 

After the Supreme Court ruling, Sacramento police publicly said they would start arresting people under camping ordinances more often. 

I wanted to try to use data to quantify what was happening in Sacramento County. 

I looked at the information on citations in our city’s open data portal and saw just how much arrests had jumped after the Grants Pass ruling. I also found another dataset from our regional parks police: They, too, had ramped up arrests for camping. An arrest doesn’t always lead to a stint in jail, but more arrests tend to mean more jail. 

I got the average daily cost of housing someone in our county jail (before medical expenses), so I could then use that number to estimate the costs of keeping homeless people in jail. 

In the end, I did not get the exact answers that I wanted about the county jail. This is partly because, as I learned, the sheriff does not formally ask people at booking about whether they are homeless. Because of that, I didn’t get a good idea of exactly how long people were spending behind bars, and couldn't calculate exactly how much money was spent based on the average daily rate. In the data they eventually released, I generally couldn’t see which individuals were homeless (because the sheriff's office didn't know), and I also couldn't see when they were booked and released.

However, with support from my senior fellow, veteran data journalist MaryJo Webster, I did get aggregate data from the jail health care provider, which is part of the county’s Department of Health Services. Care providers, I learned, do ask people whether they’re homeless at booking. The numbers were staggering — there were well over 10,000 bookings of homeless people in 12 months. Cross-referencing the jail health numbers with the total bookings published by the state, I saw that about one-third of jail bookings in our county involved a person who was homeless.

It took literally months to get that answer, which in itself is surprising. Since this is a big problem and since other official documents show the county has been aware of the problem for years, why isn’t it more closely tracked? In a separate grant application, the county has indicated that jail is not the most cost-effective way to deal with homelessness. The county said that a substantial number of homeless people being arrested are there on low-level charges: in addition to camping, they see a lot of drug offenses and other low-level alleged crimes. A county official told me that just being outside increases the likelihood of a police interaction, which increases the likelihood of going to jail. In other words, a lot of the charges that wouldn’t appear directly related to homelessness are directly related to homelessness. The data show that a significant minority of homeless people in jail also have diagnoses of serious mental illnesses. 

What I learned from this reporting process is that sometimes the data comes from an unexpected source. I had to go to the county health department for data I thought the sheriff would have. Sometimes a lack of data is part of the story: Why isn't the sheriff tracking this?

I also learned that you should always try to figure out who is trying to fix a problem. The health department was setting up a program to keep homeless people out of jail — at the same time that local police agencies were increasing arrests over homeless citations. That’s a contradiction taxpayers deserve to know about. How do police agencies think that jailing homeless people is a necessary step, while other local officials in the county health department think that homeless people in jail is a worrying issue we need to address? 

A lot of people are convinced that homelessness is an intractable problem, but part of the issue is that our “solutions” are often working at cross-purposes. Readers — taxpayers — need to understand that. In the case of my reporting, the health department and law enforcement were, in a way, working against each other. I’ve seen similar contradictions in other stories: one agency seeks funding for a homeless shelter while another agency displaces all the people who were supposed to go into that shelter; a homeless woman can’t get her family photos out of her RV in the impound lot because she can’t produce the documents showing she owns it, and she can’t produce the documents because they’re in the RV which is in the impound lot. 

We are collectively spending so much money on these responses, and if you scratch below the surface, you'll find uncoordinated responses that make little sense when put together. Reporters can do that.

And jail is part of that larger story.