How many people are homeless before they enter prison? How many leave prison with no fixed destination? Of the 70 percent of released prisoners who return to prison, what proportion are homeless?
If only for public safety reasons, you might assume the correctional system would want to know those numbers. But surprisingly, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) does not explicitly track that information.
A well-funded assessment tool (COMPAS) was launched in 2008 to predict which inmates were likely to become higher-risk parolees. A preliminary assessment of its data estimated that 39 percent of inmates were at high risk of “residential instability.”
Upon request, the research branch of the CDCR provided a one-time summary of the total number of parolees -- and their housing status -- at fixed point in time. (Note that parolees do not represent all released prisoners; those who are released after serving out their sentences do not have to go on parole.) CDCR reported that 1,193 parolees were homeless in Los Angeles County with no identifiable address -- one in 25 parolees in Los Angeles County. Viewed in the context of Los Angeles' 2009 point-in-time Annual Homeless Count, CDCR's data suggest that one in 50 homeless people in L.A. is an active parolee.
The situation in San Francisco was similar. CDCR reported that homeless parolees numbered 199 -- one in seven, or 13 percent of active parolees. Based on San Francisco's 2009 point-in-time Homeless Count, that means that one in 33 homeless persons is an active parolee.
For this report, researchers defined as homeless only those parolees who listed themselves as either "transient" or "homeless." This is a very narrow definition of homelessness, excluding anyone who lists a shelter's street address or his mother's address (even if she wouldn’t let him stay there).