With nowhere to go, homeless land in jail
With nowhere to go, homeless land in jail
City defends aggressive policing, but would offering shelter cost less?
SARASOTA It costs taxpayers about $925 when police arrest a homeless person for drinking a beer in public or sleeping behind a church, a Herald-Tribune analysis shows.
Aggressive enforcement of city ordinances that target the homeless has led to 1,427 arrests over the past three years, costing taxpayers $1.3 million, the analysis shows.
And the number of arrests has risen sharply over the past six months, adding to overcrowding at the jail. County officials, who are planning to build a $56 million jail to accommodate the increasing jail population, even considered a special charge to the city of Sarasota each time police arrest someone for public urination, illegal camping, curbside drinking or panhandling.
Police and city officials say it is more expensive to do nothing than make the arrests, which they say keep crime down and the downtown area safe and clean for residents, businesses and tourists.
"If you don't feel safe to go downtown, do you think we're going to have downtown businesses, do you think we'll have a tax base downtown?" asks Sarasota City Manager Robert Bartolotta. "We have ordinances and we're a society of laws, so if we have ordinances, it needs to be enforced."
Bartolotta disputes the newspaper's analysis.
National homeless advocates branded Sarasota the nation's meanest city in 2006. A local advocate says the money would be better spent building housing and shelters and addressing the root problems of homelessness.
"It's not only the right thing, but the most fiscally responsible thing to do," said Richard Martin, a former Sarasota mayor who is now executive director of the Suncoast Partnership to End Homelessness. "We're forced into finding a better model at this point."
He said judges and clerks would be paid, officers would still be on the payroll and the jail would still operate regardless of how many homeless people are in jail on city violations.
Criminal justice experts and a University of South Florida economist say the Herald-Tribune estimate is conservative and fair, as each arrest puts someone in jail and creates another case for the county's courts. That contributes to a higher demand for jail bed space, time from judges and more work for the courts.
"If you elect to trigger this process, this is what it costs us to ramp up to do this," said David Bennett, a criminal justice consultant hired by the county to study ways to reduce the jail population.
Catch and release
The homeless people, who are usually too broke to post $120 bail to get out of jail for violating the city laws, have two options.
They can plead guilty at their earliest opportunity and spend as little as a week in jail, or fight the charge and spend at least 30 days in jail waiting for their next court appearance.
Court officials hold a hearing every Friday to take pleas and get people arrested for minor crimes out of jail, a strategy for keeping down the jail population.
On Feb. 15, nine homeless defendants were at the hearing. Collectively, they had accounted for more than 200 arrests on misdemeanor charges over the past few years.
Among them was Jeffrey Gale, 48, who pleaded guilty to an open container charge nine days earlier. He had been out of jail for two days when he was arrested again on charges of open container and trespassing.
After 45 arrests, Gale is well acquainted with the judge who presided over that hearing, as well as the public defender representing him, the bailiffs guarding him, and the sort of plea deal they would offer.
For the latest open container and trespassing charges, he took a 15-day sentence with credit for time served, meaning he was scheduled to get out yesterday.
Then there was the $298 in court costs and fines the judge imposed, and Gale's response: "Wow."
Gale already owed $6,065 in similar fees and fines.
Even if he paid them today, it would be a small dent in the more than $41,000 his arrests have cost taxpayers, according to the Herald-Tribune analysis.
Gale told the judge he is starting to lose track of all the places that he has been ordered to stay away from. The list includes the Resurrection House -- a daytime resource center that provides help to the homeless.
"Excuse me, your honor," a bailiff said after Gale's brief appearance before the judge. "Mr. Gale, can we trespass him from jail?"
'Tough love'
The Herald-Tribune analysis may underestimate the costs of arresting the homeless, say criminal justice experts, because it does not include arrests that start with a suspected city law violation that lead to arrests on more serious charges.
For example, the 1,400 arrests tallied by the Herald-Tribune do not include one in which an officer cited a homeless man for panhandling, then found a knife in his pocket and charged him with both panhandling and carrying a concealed weapon.
Likewise, the newspaper's tally would not include a case in which a homeless person cited for illegal camping was found to have drugs, and was charged for illegal camping and drug possession.
Most of the city's laws that target the homeless were adopted in 2002. Martin, when he was mayor, called them a "tough love" approach to problems with the homeless; the National Coalition for the Homeless later branded Sarasota one of the nation's meanest cities toward the homeless.
Police have dedicated an officer to keeping tabs on the homeless and their camps, as well as directing officers not to ignore any infractions.
When officers spot a person breaking the city's laws, they have the discretion to inform them of the rules, issue warnings, or cite them and give them a court date, said police spokesman Capt. Bill Spitler. He said officers do not make arrests unless it is the same person breaking the same rules over and over again or the person refuses to stop breaking city rules.
"We don't arrest everybody now, come on," Spitler said. "The people going to jail for these violations, this isn't their first rodeo, cowboy."
And some of the homeless spend a lot more time in jail than others.
Police know Mark E. Saunders by sight, and have nicknamed him "John Wayne," though Spitler and another officer could not recall how the nickname originated.
Less than a week after officers cited Saunders for an open container, police found him spreading a beige sheet in the rear entryway of Church of the Redeemer on Palm Avenue about 2 a.m.
According to an arrest report, Saunders held an open plastic Icehouse beer bottle, and told officers he was getting ready to go to sleep. He was charged with breaking the city's rules against curbside drinking and camping in public.
Businesses like the church "don't want people sleeping there, they don't want people urinating in their bushes, they don't want to clean up bottles," Spitler said.
Back to the cell
Martin, the homeless advocate, said the city needs to rethink its approach.
"It's just not working," Martin said. "Should someone really be arrested for something that would be normal inside a house, but you don't have a house?"
He suggested the city look into ways to keep the homeless out of jail, by building subsidized housing to help people recover, or alternative sentences to keep them out of jail.
City Manager Bartolotta said the city is working with the county and judges to create alternative sentencing programs, making ordinance violators clean parks or the beach instead of sitting in jail.
The county has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a jail consultant and new programs to reduce the jail population. Leaders in the criminal justice community are meeting Monday to discuss alternatives to arresting ordinance violators.
Arrests are a more expensive and less effective solution than shelters or other options because the court system does not address why the person does not have a home in the first place, said Bennett, the consultant the county hired.
"We've got the person off the street. And that's it," Bennett said. "The criminal justice system is not designed to take care of this person and their problems."
Last year, the public defender's office in Broward County stopped representing those arrested for breaking city laws in Fort Lauderdale, after studying the issue and finding it was about $30 a night for a shelter bed and $90 or more for a jail bed.
"You just end up criminalizing people and further hampering their ability to reintegrate into society," said Doug Brawley, the public defender's office chief deputy.
In Sarasota County, people arrested for breaking municipal ordinances spent an average of 7.4 days in jail in 2006, a county study found.
During the Feb. 15 "jail sweep" court hearing, one man, Bobby Bryant, was offered 20 days in jail with credit for time served for a trespassing charge.
He had not been not causing a problem, but a security guard spotted him passing through an area he had been warned to stay away from.
But because Bryant has had 12 convictions in the past year, County Judge Judy Goldman thought the sentence offer was too light. She passed the case on to an arraignment set for Tuesday. And Bryant went back to his jail cell for another two weeks.
City defends aggressive policing, but would offering shelter cost less?
SARASOTA It costs taxpayers about $925 when police arrest a homeless person for drinking a beer in public or sleeping behind a church, a Herald-Tribune analysis shows.
Aggressive enforcement of city ordinances that target the homeless has led to 1,427 arrests over the past three years, costing taxpayers $1.3 million, the analysis shows.
And the number of arrests has risen sharply over the past six months, adding to overcrowding at the jail. County officials, who are planning to build a $56 million jail to accommodate the increasing jail population, even considered a special charge to the city of Sarasota each time police arrest someone for public urination, illegal camping, curbside drinking or panhandling.
Police and city officials say it is more expensive to do nothing than make the arrests, which they say keep crime down and the downtown area safe and clean for residents, businesses and tourists.
"If you don't feel safe to go downtown, do you think we're going to have downtown businesses, do you think we'll have a tax base downtown?" asks Sarasota City Manager Robert Bartolotta. "We have ordinances and we're a society of laws, so if we have ordinances, it needs to be enforced."
Bartolotta disputes the newspaper's analysis.
National homeless advocates branded Sarasota the nation's meanest city in 2006. A local advocate says the money would be better spent building housing and shelters and addressing the root problems of homelessness.
"It's not only the right thing, but the most fiscally responsible thing to do," said Richard Martin, a former Sarasota mayor who is now executive director of the Suncoast Partnership to End Homelessness. "We're forced into finding a better model at this point."
He said judges and clerks would be paid, officers would still be on the payroll and the jail would still operate regardless of how many homeless people are in jail on city violations.
Criminal justice experts and a University of South Florida economist say the Herald-Tribune estimate is conservative and fair, as each arrest puts someone in jail and creates another case for the county's courts. That contributes to a higher demand for jail bed space, time from judges and more work for the courts.
"If you elect to trigger this process, this is what it costs us to ramp up to do this," said David Bennett, a criminal justice consultant hired by the county to study ways to reduce the jail population.
Catch and release
The homeless people, who are usually too broke to post $120 bail to get out of jail for violating the city laws, have two options.
They can plead guilty at their earliest opportunity and spend as little as a week in jail, or fight the charge and spend at least 30 days in jail waiting for their next court appearance.
Court officials hold a hearing every Friday to take pleas and get people arrested for minor crimes out of jail, a strategy for keeping down the jail population.
On Feb. 15, nine homeless defendants were at the hearing. Collectively, they had accounted for more than 200 arrests on misdemeanor charges over the past few years.
Among them was Jeffrey Gale, 48, who pleaded guilty to an open container charge nine days earlier. He had been out of jail for two days when he was arrested again on charges of open container and trespassing.
After 45 arrests, Gale is well acquainted with the judge who presided over that hearing, as well as the public defender representing him, the bailiffs guarding him, and the sort of plea deal they would offer.
For the latest open container and trespassing charges, he took a 15-day sentence with credit for time served, meaning he was scheduled to get out yesterday.
Then there was the $298 in court costs and fines the judge imposed, and Gale's response: "Wow."
Gale already owed $6,065 in similar fees and fines.
Even if he paid them today, it would be a small dent in the more than $41,000 his arrests have cost taxpayers, according to the Herald-Tribune analysis.
Gale told the judge he is starting to lose track of all the places that he has been ordered to stay away from. The list includes the Resurrection House -- a daytime resource center that provides help to the homeless.
"Excuse me, your honor," a bailiff said after Gale's brief appearance before the judge. "Mr. Gale, can we trespass him from jail?"
'Tough love'
The Herald-Tribune analysis may underestimate the costs of arresting the homeless, say criminal justice experts, because it does not include arrests that start with a suspected city law violation that lead to arrests on more serious charges.
For example, the 1,400 arrests tallied by the Herald-Tribune do not include one in which an officer cited a homeless man for panhandling, then found a knife in his pocket and charged him with both panhandling and carrying a concealed weapon.
Likewise, the newspaper's tally would not include a case in which a homeless person cited for illegal camping was found to have drugs, and was charged for illegal camping and drug possession.
Most of the city's laws that target the homeless were adopted in 2002. Martin, when he was mayor, called them a "tough love" approach to problems with the homeless; the National Coalition for the Homeless later branded Sarasota one of the nation's meanest cities toward the homeless.
Police have dedicated an officer to keeping tabs on the homeless and their camps, as well as directing officers not to ignore any infractions.
When officers spot a person breaking the city's laws, they have the discretion to inform them of the rules, issue warnings, or cite them and give them a court date, said police spokesman Capt. Bill Spitler. He said officers do not make arrests unless it is the same person breaking the same rules over and over again or the person refuses to stop breaking city rules.
"We don't arrest everybody now, come on," Spitler said. "The people going to jail for these violations, this isn't their first rodeo, cowboy."
And some of the homeless spend a lot more time in jail than others.
Police know Mark E. Saunders by sight, and have nicknamed him "John Wayne," though Spitler and another officer could not recall how the nickname originated.
Less than a week after officers cited Saunders for an open container, police found him spreading a beige sheet in the rear entryway of Church of the Redeemer on Palm Avenue about 2 a.m.
According to an arrest report, Saunders held an open plastic Icehouse beer bottle, and told officers he was getting ready to go to sleep. He was charged with breaking the city's rules against curbside drinking and camping in public.
Businesses like the church "don't want people sleeping there, they don't want people urinating in their bushes, they don't want to clean up bottles," Spitler said.
Back to the cell
Martin, the homeless advocate, said the city needs to rethink its approach.
"It's just not working," Martin said. "Should someone really be arrested for something that would be normal inside a house, but you don't have a house?"
He suggested the city look into ways to keep the homeless out of jail, by building subsidized housing to help people recover, or alternative sentences to keep them out of jail.
City Manager Bartolotta said the city is working with the county and judges to create alternative sentencing programs, making ordinance violators clean parks or the beach instead of sitting in jail.
The county has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a jail consultant and new programs to reduce the jail population. Leaders in the criminal justice community are meeting Monday to discuss alternatives to arresting ordinance violators.
Arrests are a more expensive and less effective solution than shelters or other options because the court system does not address why the person does not have a home in the first place, said Bennett, the consultant the county hired.
"We've got the person off the street. And that's it," Bennett said. "The criminal justice system is not designed to take care of this person and their problems."
Last year, the public defender's office in Broward County stopped representing those arrested for breaking city laws in Fort Lauderdale, after studying the issue and finding it was about $30 a night for a shelter bed and $90 or more for a jail bed.
"You just end up criminalizing people and further hampering their ability to reintegrate into society," said Doug Brawley, the public defender's office chief deputy.
In Sarasota County, people arrested for breaking municipal ordinances spent an average of 7.4 days in jail in 2006, a county study found.
During the Feb. 15 "jail sweep" court hearing, one man, Bobby Bryant, was offered 20 days in jail with credit for time served for a trespassing charge.
He had not been not causing a problem, but a security guard spotted him passing through an area he had been warned to stay away from.
But because Bryant has had 12 convictions in the past year, County Judge Judy Goldman thought the sentence offer was too light. She passed the case on to an arraignment set for Tuesday. And Bryant went back to his jail cell for another two weeks.
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