with the current criminalization of poverty arresting and jailing homeless people can become quite expensive.salt lake city found a new approach that is more humane and...what this? 60% cheaper!

from alternet:
Kilee Lowe was sitting in a park when cops picked her up and booked her into jail overnight.

After she got out the next morning, she returned to the park. The same officer who had thrown her into a cell not 24 hours before booked her again. It was back to jail for Kilee.

Kilee has been cycling in and out of the criminal justice system for years. After three and a half years in federal prison, she’s been homeless for a little over a year now.

“Just because I don’t have a credit card in my pocket,” she says, “does not make me a criminal.”

Kilee lives in one of hundreds of American cities that have criminalized homelessness. Sometimes the “crime” is loitering. Sometimes it’s panhandling. In 2014 alone, one hundred American cities have banned sitting or lying down in public places. Wherever it happens, the fallout is frustratingly similar.

Not having a roof over your head means living in a continual crisis. The stress of not knowing where you’ll sleep at night, whether your family will be safe, and if you’ll be able to eat can suck up all your energy and your will. Regular stints in jail can only make it more difficult to find stability.

Not only that, but they drain tax dollars that could be put to much better use.

Salt Lake City crunched the numbers. And the prescription was clear. The city was spending $20,000 per homeless resident per year – funding for policing, arrests, jail time, shelter, and emergency services. Homelessness was not going down. Instead, for $7,800 a year through a new program called Housing First, the city could provide a person with an apartment and case management services.

In 2005, the city was spending $40 million to address chronic homelessness. Several years after starting the Housing First program, in 2013, spending was down to $9.6 million.

And more importantly, chronic homelessness has dropped 72 percent.