One-third of people going into Sacramento County’s jail system are homeless
One-third of people headed into Sacramento County jails each month were identified as homeless in the past year, new data show — a number that shows little has changed since the start of the decade.
The newly released data from 2025 and 2026 show that there were more bookings of homeless people than there were homeless individuals each month, meaning that some were booked into jail, released, and then jailed again within the same month.
A spokesperson for the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to a request for a comment.
When individuals enter the jail system, the Sacramento County Department of Health Services screens them, asking about matters that include medical and mental health conditions as well as factors such as housing status. In response to a Public Records Act request, the department released aggregate data on bookings of people who were flagged as homeless between June 2025 and May 2026.
In each month, health personnel in the Sacramento County jail system noted between 794 and 920 homeless people.
California releases data on the total number of people booked in jails monthly. Between June 2025 and March 2026, the most recently available month of data from the Board of State and Community Corrections, homeless people represented one-third of the population of people being booked in Sacramento County.
A report presented to the county in 2022 that analyzed 2021 data similarly found that almost one-third of people leaving the jail appeared to be homeless. The researcher identified more robust housing services as an important strategy to help safely reduce the jail population and save taxpayer dollars.
“Incarceration is one of the costliest ‘interventions’ a community can make,” the report to the Sacramento County Supervisors said.
Like the 2022 jail population analysis presented to the county, an analysis by The Sacramento Bee of data from October 2023 to the end of September 2024 found that about 30% of bookings each month were bookings of homeless people, and an average of 838 homeless individuals were held in Sacramento County jails each month.
Those numbers concerned experts.
Jail stays can worsen homelessness
“Criminalization actually makes solving homelessness harder,” said Alex Visotzky, who previously worked at the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority and is now the senior California policy fellow at the National Alliance to End Homelessness. He said that when people without stable housing are incarcerated, they can fall out of contact with case managers, miss work and lose income, and they may gain or add to a criminal record that could hamper them in a future search for employment and housing. They can also lose trust in public systems.
“Jailing folks experiencing homelessness,” he said, “is one of the best ways to prolong their homelessness.”
Research has shown that when a person is homeless, it makes an arrest more likely; at the same time, housing services can help people stay out of jail. But local governments have received conflicting guidance from the state. While agencies have long worked to reduce California’s jail populations, last year Gov. Gavin Newsom urged California cities to ban camping in the same location for more than three nights.
In 2025, Timothy Lutz, director of the county’s Department of Health Services, said that living outside increases a person’s risk of arrest on other charges because they have more exposure to law enforcement officers. He said that many homeless people end up in a “cycle of recidivism,” which is often related to low-level drug charges or other relatively minor offenses. Since the Supreme Court’s 2024 ruling in Grants Pass v. Johnson — which cleared the way for municipalities to cite, arrest and charge homeless people for living outside when they had nowhere else to go — The Bee has reported that camping charges have also directly led to jail stints.
Prison Policy Initiative spokesperson Wanda Bertram pointed out that her organization’s analysis of data tracking 440,000 bookings at 175 jails in the U.S. found that most homeless people were booked on charges for property crimes or “public order” or “quality of life” offenses, for example camping or disturbing the peace. In the national numbers, 13% of homeless people had landed in jail on charges for violent crimes, compared to 20% of all people booked. Homeless people were also far more likely to be jailed multiple times within the same year.
“Sweeping unhoused people into jails,” Bertram said, “doesn’t do much to stabilize them, and in fact it can destabilize them.”
Mental illness behind bars
For the 12 months between June 2025 and the end of May this year, an average of 102 people — about 12% of homeless people booked into the jail each month — were identified as having a serious mental illness. Those diagnoses included schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorders, borderline personality disorder, post-traumatic stress syndrome, major depressive disorder, and bipolar or related disorders.
In 2022, the county-commissioned report found that almost half of the jail population on any given day had either a serious mental illness, a substance use disorder or both. The researcher said that part of the reason so many people with mental health issues landed in jail was related to a lack of mental health and housing resources outside the jail, which could have prevented some bookings.
Keeping people with mental illnesses and substance use disorders out of the jail and prison system has been a decades-long struggle in the state. In 2001, California convened the Council on Criminal Justice and Behavioral Health, which, until last year, advised the administration and legislature on how to reduce and prevent the incarceration of people with mental health and substance use disorders. In 2021, the council published a report on homelessness and behavioral health.
Like Lutz, that report also described people trapped in a cycle: People with behavioral health issues are more likely to be incarcerated and more likely to be homeless, and incarceration itself also increases the risk that a person will become homeless. Many moved between shelters, emergency rooms and jails “at great public cost,” the report said, because there were no appropriate settings for them to receive the safe housing and care they needed outside jail.
“If we don’t address basic needs — safety, security, shelter — it’s really difficult to get people to successfully engage for some of the higher-level type of work, like mental health treatment, substance use treatment,” Lutz said last year.
