Homelessness: Why Detainment and Imprisonment Won't Solve It

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It seems like homeless in our community who end up getting arrested just to be released a short time later and then having the cycle repeat has been a rather endless cycle. The process of this is that a homeless person is caught with a low-level crime like theft and drug usage, they are arrested and booked into jail and then released a short time later, and this cycle repeats over and over. In 2018 in the Portland area alone, more than 2,000 homeless people were booked into jail and they made up more than 8,000 of the bookings. The data for this shows that this endless cycle does exist and that arresting the homeless doesn’t resolve the crime. In fact, 87% of the homeless people who were arrested back in 2016, just ended up getting arrested and sent to jail again in the next three years after that. Long answer short: arresting the homeless isn’t going to solve anything.


Instead what local leaders should be doing is that rather than using law enforcement to arrest the homeless just to have to face this cycle all over again, they should be rather than sending the homeless to jail, send them to social services and treatment centers where they will be able to learn how to quit drug usage and small nuisance crimes among them. Along with this, the homeless should be provided housing or sent to shelters so that they’ll have a place to stay and somewhere to be outside of the cold, given how freezing cold the winters can be in Portland and in the Pacific Northwest in general. While arresting and sending the homeless to prison has been the one method a lot of cities have been doing in an attempt to solve homelessness, it's just not going to benefit them at all in the long run.

To learn more about how this impacts homelessness locally, visit:

https://www.oregonlive.com/crime/2020/10/booking-homeless-portlanders-into-jail-is-endless-expensive-cycle-that-arrests-dont-curb-but-housing-does.html

To learn more about this issue or to see how you could help, visit:

https://nationalhomeless.org/issues/civil-rights/

Author: Victor Cheung


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