23 homeless people jailed for living outside in Sacramento County, recent records show
Twenty-three individuals were booked into the Sacramento County jail on charges related to being homeless over a period of four weeks, an analysis of April and May booking data shows.
Collectively, the records show that these 23 people spent just over 20 days behind bars. About 74% were arrested under Sacramento City Code.
Using the average daily cost of housing a person in one of Sacramento County’s jails — the Main Jail downtown and the Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center near Elk Grove — jailing those 23 people in connection with camping violations cost taxpayers about $4,060. That cost does not include any medical care. It also does not include the cost of detaining unhoused people in police custody before booking. According to the records, those periods usually lasted about two hours.
Most of the 23 people spent less than a day in jail. The median amount of time they were incarcerated, according to the data, was 7 hours and 48 minutes.
In total, 58 people faced at least one camping-related charge during those four weeks. Most of their non-camping charges were related to the possession of drugs or drug paraphernalia.
The analysis was based on jail booking data that the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office released to The Sacramento Bee in response to a Public Records Act request. The Bee examined all the booking charges for individuals jailed on at least one alleged camping violation between April 29 and May 20. Among the 23, the data show that 20 faced only charges of camping, storing personal property in public, blocking a sidewalk or some combination thereof.
The three remaining individuals in this group had additional booking charges that appeared to be directly connected to living outside. One person was arrested and jailed on May 9 for both camping and trespassing. One was booked on charges of obstructing a sidewalk, camping and misdemeanor vandalism. The third was booked for unlawful camping, unlawful storage of personal property in public and for stealing a utility.
Most of the people arrested for camping charges spent relatively short amounts of time in jail. According to the data, the shortest amount of time it took for an individual to be cited and released was 14 minutes. Some of the individuals were still in jail at the time the dataset cut off: 11:59 p.m. May 20. Between April 29 and the cutoff, the longest time someone spent behind bars on camping-related charges was just under four days. That individual was arrested by the Sacramento Police Department and booked on misdemeanor charges of camping in public and obstructing a sidewalk.
Previous reporting by The Sacramento Bee found that 30% of jail bookings involve a homeless person. Most of those people do not face a camping charge and were not included in this analysis: Each month, hundreds of homeless individuals are jailed in the county. The director of the Sacramento County Department of Health Services, Timothy Lutz, said that homeless people become caught in a costly “cycle of recidivism.”
Many of the incarcerated homeless, Lutz said, end up in jail on low-level charges, including minor alleged drug offenses like those reflected in this analysis of booking records. Lutz said living outside increases the chance that a person will interact with a law enforcement officer, which increases the chance that an arrest will occur.
