Most Americans understand the link between homelessness and crime. But activists and academics reject the connection, insisting that the homeless pose no elevated crime threat. A new report from the Cicero Institute complicates their argument, revealing that a large share of the nation’s homeless population is composed of registered sex offenders.
The report, covering 41 states, compared counts of sex offenders listed as “homeless” or “address unknown” on state registries with the federal Point-in-Time Count database to determine what proportion of a state’s homeless population appears on its sex-offender registry.
