This story by Robert Davis appeared on Colorado Newsline on September 12, 2023.
Moving into Denver’s ‘Project: Elevate’ campus was one of the toughest days of Melissa Savage’s life. While she would gain a stable home at the community corrections facility, Savage also left her husband behind to live on Denver’s streets by himself.
Savage, 51, and her husband, Bill, moved to Denver in 2018 to be closer to family and eventually retire. But they ended up getting evicted the following year and weren’t able to recover from it financially, she said. Savage added that the two started selling scrap metal to supplement her disability payments, but their income was nowhere near enough to afford rent.
After more than four years of living on the streets, Savage said she caught a couple of charges and was sentenced to spend 15 months in community corrections, a sentencing alternative in lieu of imprisonment.
Savage said Project: Elevate has given her a place to feel safe and can help connect her with job options. But she worries about finding stable housing once she is released because of her criminal record.
“It’s hard to get out of the system once you get into it,” Savage said. “It’s even harder to prove yourself worthy on paper.”
Savage is part of a large number of unhoused Coloradans who live along what experts describe as the “incarceration to homelessness pipeline.” The Prison Policy Initiative describes the pipeline in stark terms: People who have a prior history of incarceration are 10 times more likely than the general public to experience homelessness. Savage added that living unsheltered increases the risk of recidivism because the traumatizing lifestyle often leads people to use drugs or commit crimes to survive.
But Colorado is looking to close that pipeline by participating in a new public policy incubator by the Harvard Kennedy School Government Performance Lab and develop a way to connect incarcerated folks with housing pre-release. Participants will receive one year of pro bono applied research and technical assistance from the lab, and will be able to access research from other jurisdictions while crafting their models. The other inaugural participants are Chicago and Detroit.
These efforts come at a time when homelessness has increased in Colorado by 5.5% since 2020, which was the last year a full count was conducted, while home prices and rents continue to rise.
“Jurisdictions know that to sustainably reduce homelessness, they need both a comprehensive prevention strategy to curb inflow and bold approaches to reimagine the rehousing process,” the lab’s director of homelessness and housing, Carin Clary, said in a press release.
Colorado Gov. Jared Polis added that he hopes the collaboration will deliver “innovative, data-driven solutions that will help prevent homelessness and reduce recidivism” while also improving public safety.
Closing the incarceration to homelessness pipeline could have a big impact in Colorado. In 2018, the most recent data available, the Colorado Department of Public Safety found that 85% of people in state prisons had experienced homelessness within 12 months of being incarcerated. And 46.3% of people who had housing before their arrest expected to become homeless upon their release, according to the report.
Savage said homelessness can make it nearly impossible to comply with one’s conditions of release. She said she had a hard time keeping track of what day it was and often missed her appointments to check in with her probation officer. For people with traumatic brain injuries or mental health challenges, she said simple tasks like making a phone call can be even more daunting.
One way to break the pipeline is to use a “housing first” model to address homelessness, according to the Urban Institute. Housing first refers to the practice of placing a homeless person into stable housing before they enter other treatment programs. The assumption is that housing provides a foundation for a person to begin the healing process.
Denver developed a successful housing first model using its Social Impact Bond program, which launched in 2016. The SIB attracted $8.6 million from eight private investors to place more than 363 homeless people into housing for three years. Over that time, participants reported that police contacts declined by 34% and arrests dropped by 40%, according to the Urban Institute’s evaluation of the program.
Jail stays also declined considerably. Participants reported a 30% overall decline in the number of times individuals were incarcerated, and each participant spent an average of 38 fewer days in jail, the Urban Institute found.
To Savage, Colorado’s efforts to close the pipeline are notable because she said there are a lot of people who are falling through the cracks.
“People don’t understand that it can be difficult going from being homeless to having a roof over your head,” Savage said. “But homelessness doesn’t end there. A lot of unsheltered people don’t have the ability to maintain a job. There’s more healing that has to happen.”