One County Spent Over $5 Million Jailing Homeless People Instead Of Giving Them Homes

A volunteer interviews a homeless Florida man. Laws that make it a crime to live as a homeless person make little sense from a moral vantage point. New data shows they make even less sense from a fiscal standpoint.
Over the past decade, municipalities in Florida’s Osceola County, just southeast of Orlando, have spent more than $5 million to repeatedly jail three dozen homeless people for
quality-of-life offenses.
Rather than major crimes like assault or burglary, nearly every one of these arrests were because of violations of local ordinances prohibiting activities that many homeless people do to survive, such as sleeping in public or panhandling. Laws that criminalize homelessness can lead to an inescapable cycle of poverty.
The data was collected by Impact Homelessness, an advocacy group in central Florida. The organization identified 37 homeless people in Osceola County who were collectively arrested 1,250 times between 2004 and 2013 at a cost of $104 per booking. During that time, these people spent 61,896 days incarcerated at an average cost of $80 per day.
Altogether, Osceola County communities spent $5,081,680 over the past decade to repeatedly jail just 37 homeless people.

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