Homeless Defendants in Felony Court

Abstract

Considerable research assesses how marginalized groups experience disparate outcomes in courts and sentencing processes. One group that largely has been left out of this research is individuals experiencing homelessness. Little to no research focuses specifically on how the unhoused fare relative to domiciled individuals in felony court settings. Yet, limited access to private space paired with societal criminalization of the homeless makes them uniquely positioned to enter the criminal justice system and supports the homeless-incarceration nexus. We hypothesize that homeless individuals experience harsher outcomes throughout case processing due to their lack of economic resources, which constrains their ability to defend against prosecution, and court actors’ perception that they pose a danger to public safety. To investigate these issues, we analyze randomly selected felony cases using a cumulative disadvantage framework that tracked each case from arrest to disposition in Pinellas County (St. Petersburg), Florida. We find that approximately 20% of defendants in our sample were experiencing homelessness at the time of their arrest, and these homeless defendants were more likely to be detained pretrial, which in turn increased their probability of being convicted. We conclude with a discussion of the policy implications of this study.