This Major Funder Hopes to Break the Link Between Homelessness and Incarceration
/
San Francisco is one of four regions participating in a new partnership focused on homelessness and incarceration. Myra Thompson/shutterstock
As communities across the country deploy a variety of strategies to address the difficult issue of homelessness, a new initiative launched by the MacArthur Foundation and the Urban Institute is focused on the often overlooked connection between housing instability and incarceration.
It turns out that as many as 1 in 4 people experience periods of homelessness in the year before they are incarcerated, and COVID-19 made the problem worse. In a vicious cycle, being homeless increases a person’s risk of being ensnared in the justice system, and time in jail in turn makes it harder for an individual to find stable housing after their release. People of color are at a disproportionately high risk of falling into this downward spiral.
The goal of the MacArthur Foundation’s Just Home Project is to disrupt that cycle — and to break the link between incarceration and homelessness. MacArthur selected four communities (Charleston County, South Carolina; Minnehaha County, South Dakota; the city and county of San Francisco, California; and Tulsa County, Oklahoma) to create a plan for addressing this issue in their respective regions, with funding from the foundation and technical assistance and coordination support from the Urban Institute. The project was launched with a $5 million grant from MacArthur — $3.2 million will go to the four selected communities and $1.8 million will support the Urban Institute’s technical assistance and coordination work. Further support will be available through impact investing from MacArthur.
A number of funders, including the MacArthur Foundation, have been seeking solutions to homelessness for many years and from many directions, as IP outlined in its report, Giving for Housing and Homelessness. Other major funders, with MacArthur again taking a major role, have devoted abundant resources to criminal justice reform, as IP’s brief, Giving for Criminal Justice makes clear. But identifying some of the root causes of homelessness and the failures of our criminal justice system reveals a powerful connection between the two; the Just Home Project carves out fresh territory by acknowledging and directly addressing that link.
“Criminal justice reform cannot happen in a silo — it is pivotal to address adjacent issues that contribute to ongoing crises in the system,” said Laurie Garduque, director of criminal justice at the MacArthur Foundation, when the initiative was announced. “Tackling housing instability head-on is critical to decreasing the misuse and overuse of jails and systemic and structural racial inequities, and it is a much-needed step toward transforming the entire justice system.”
Just home
Garduque says this link between housing instability and time in jail is a local problem, but one that is occurring in communities across the country. To demonstrate, she points to the many jurisdictions that expressed interest in participating in the Just Home Project. The foundation prioritized cities that were working on reducing their jail populations and addressing racial inequities; then, through a competitive selection process, it zeroed in on the final four.
The Just Home Project builds on MacArthur’s years of work on criminal justice reform — specifically on over-incarceration in jails. All of the jurisdictions that were considered, including the final four selected, participated in MacArthur’s Safety and Justice Challenge, a program that IP reported on previously, launched in 2015.
The goal of the challenge, according to a 2019 evaluation of the program, was to “tackle one of America’s greatest social problems — over incarceration in local jurisdictions. This overreliance on jails has disproportionately impacted communities of color, those too poor to post bail, nonviolent offenders, and persons with mental illness.” Many of those who end up in jail haven’t been convicted of any crime, as the Safety and Justice Challenge website makes clear: “62% of people sitting in jails across the country are presumed innocent. And most have not even been accused of crimes that would threaten public safety — 75% of people in jail are there for nonviolent offenses.”
Garduque points out the racial disparities in the jail population. “There is generally an overrepresentation of about 4 to 1 for people of color,” she said. “And then you look at why these people are in jail. It’s because they don’t have the funds and the resources to make money bail, or because they haven’t been able to pay their financial obligations, like their parking tickets or their car registration. So if the aim is to protect community safety, this isn’t making communities safer. And we have research to show how harmful even a short stay in jail can be on people’s lives.”
Housing fits into this picture because a lack of housing can lead to incarceration in many instances, particularly when local laws prohibit, for example, sitting or sleeping in public areas or asking for money. According to the Urban Institute, “Nationally, researchers have found that someone in jail is between 7.5 and 11.3 times more likely to have been homeless than someone with no history of jail incarceration.”
After an individual is released from jail, the obstacles to finding stable housing can be daunting. The person may have lost their apartment or their job, or both, while they were in jail, and lack the money for rent. Past arrest or incarceration can also limit a person’s access to government housing assistance programs, or lead a potential landlord to turn down their housing application.
Allison Clark, MacArthur’s associate director of impact investments, started at the foundation 15 years ago to work on housing issues with a focus on affordable housing. Housing for people who have spent time in jail creates a unique set of issues, she says. “The tools that we have to build affordable housing work very well for the populations that they target,” she said. “But when you’re talking about a population that isn’t necessarily chronically homeless, but maybe episodically homeless, their needs are disparate. There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach that works for everyone.”
The goal of the Just Home Project is to encourage municipalities to create people-centered housing options that consider an individual’s circumstances. “Where is the person at, based on the issues they’re facing in their life right now?” Clark said. “And how do we help address that so we can break that cycle? It may be a job security issue, it may be a substance abuse issue, maybe there’s something precluding a young person from reuniting with family. Or it may be that a person needs to be connected to an institution, say, a veteran’s support group — whatever it is that’s causing them to have this cycle of instability.”
The four communities selected are just beginning the planning process, so it is too early to know what strategies they will develop. Communities that applied for the program weren’t expected to have a solid plan, Clark says. “Actually, it was made explicitly clear that the communities didn’t have to have a solution in mind,” she said. “But they had to have demonstrated political will, and they had to demonstrate that they understood this link [between housing instability and incarceration] and who was affected by it.”
The four selected communities will receive technical assistance and coordination from the Urban Institute. According to Garduque, the communities are eager for this kind of support. “All of the finalists mentioned how important the technical assistance piece of this is. They all know their areas, but they are hungry for examples of what’s working in other places.” When the communities complete their plans, each will be eligible for long-term loans to implement the plan and acquire or develop housing, drawn from a $15 million MacArthur impact investment pool.
Coming together around the table
Homelessness is an issue that is often considered too stubborn and intractable to solve, and many cities have tried and failed to find solutions that stick. A recent New York Times article spotlighted Houston’s approach to homelessness, which seems to be working.
One of the factors contributing to Houston’s tentative progress is the cooperation of local organizations, advocates, agencies, businesses and city leaders. As Marc Eichenbaum, the Houston mayor’s special assistant for homeless initiatives, told the Times, “Housing people is a slow, extremely complicated, incremental process that requires all hands on deck, all the time, if you don’t want to settle for the status quo, much less go backward. Everyone has to come together around the table.”
That actually makes it, in theory at least, a prime topic for philanthropy to take on, with its capacity to stick with a program for a long time, and to straddle different sectors and agencies. Furthermore, both housing and criminal justice reform are problems that have drawn a lot of interest from both liberals and conservatives, as IP’s Philip Rojc recently pointed out.
The four communities selected for the Just Home Program all demonstrate high levels of cooperation. “In all four cases, the lead agency is not the criminal justice agency,” Garduque said. “It varies in terms of who it is, but the table has been set to have not only the criminal justice system involved, but also the behavioral health system and the housing organizations involved. And they all have robust community engagement. We want it to be a collaborative process that centers on racial justice and community engagement.”
According to Clark, the four selected communities are cooperating with each other, too, and she sees that as one of the benefits of the program. ”I’ve had an opportunity to be in a couple of sessions with the four cities together, and they really, for lack of a better word, they really groove on brainstorming with each other and giving each other feedback,” she said. “When you get people together in a room who are all tackling hard things, with disparate geographies and issues, they really relish the opportunity to talk to each other.”
Clark would love to see the project expand to include as many as 10 sites around the country. She’s spoken to city leaders from many regions, including representatives from a number of small cities, who have expressed interest in participating.
Establishing and expanding the program will require additional funds, and Clark believes it’s a project with the potential to attract interest from funders. “I’m very evangelical about this,” she said. “I’ve been talking to foundations on two fronts: foundations that have specific interests in housing or in criminal justice. I’m also trying to find foundations that have an interest in place, in specific cities. And there are private philanthropists and hospital systems that want to invest in their communities. I was at a meeting with a bunch of hospital systems recently, for example, and they were very interested. They recognize that this is a population that is showing up frequently in their facilities.”
The Just Home Project acknowledges that there are many reasons that people end up without a home or in jail, and that there is very often a connection between the two. It also recognizes that no single approach will work in every part of the country. Addressing the disparate factors that contribute to homelessness will take time and resources, but ignoring the problem has a high cost, too — not just in dollars, but in human misery. As Michael Kimmelman put it in the New York Times, “Half a century ago, America invented modern homelessness.” Now it’s up to us to fix it.
