A high prevalence of substance abuse among homeless persons puts them at greater risk of committing crime through arrests for possession of drugs, selling drugs, and public intoxication (Greenberg and Rosenheck, 2008). Individuals with prior incarceration history are at ten time’s greater risk of being incarcerated than individuals with no incarceration history. Moreover, individuals with co-occurring SUDs and mental disorder had five times greater risk of incarceration when compared to individuals without co-occurring mental disorders. Compared with younger individuals (ages 18–29), individuals between 45 and 64 were less likely to be incarcerated and people 65 and older were unlikely to be incarcerated. Approximately 26.5% of incarcerated people were reincarcerated within a year (Hawthorne et al., 2012).
