Homeless Sociology

Two people spend their lives cast down from society. One of these people are confined under a roof, where they are cared for and fed and the other person stays in the open hoping for at least one meal a day. Can you guess who the inmate is? The inmate is the one who has all worries attended for while the homeless person is the one who remains excluded from all help whatsoever.

Living homeless can be extremely difficult, even more difficult than in prison. This is shown by statistics that state that a fifth of homeless people have committed a crime to be imprisoned overnight. This data shows that homeless people view prison as a utopia as opposed to the normal person who would see it as a dungeon full of punishment. The main reason that the …show more content…
How homelessness impacts society starts from a single stage; homeless shelters. Some homeless shelters are funded for, however, a majority of them are not. This means that many homeless people would have to find their own source of shelter and food, this would usually be in the form of begging, dumpster digging or sleeping illegally on private property etc. Once a homeless person has been accused of committing any of these acts that are illegal, they would be fined. They would then not be able to afford to pay this ticket, causing them to be sent to court. This would all affect the legal system negatively as it would cost the government extra amounts of money and time to attend to the court procedures of the homeless person. While in the meantime, all of this money the government uses on court hearings for this person could be used to help fund homeless shelters, which in turn would cause the total number of homeless crimes to decrease. Therefore, making society function better as there would ultimately be less homeless people in the …show more content…
Once an offender is placed in prison they are surrounded by people who are just as bad as themselves. This can lead to inmates causing harm to each other. With homelessness you are not placed around very dangerous and unpredictable people like an inmate, you are only surrounded by the real-world environment. This means that a homeless person can be exposed to friendly people, however, they can also be confronted by a person with sinister intentions. When a prisoner is confronted by a person trying to initiate any harm to them they can simply find a guard or authority figure and everything will be controlled. But, with a homeless person in the middle of an area secluded from all people, even police, they can be confronted by a person with harmful intentions. If this occurs, there will be no police or anyone to stop this event from happening. However, the probability of a homeless person being confronted by another person in the world who intends harm is very slight compared to the chance of a prisoner attacking a prisoner. This is due to the ratio of good to bad people in prison being very low as prisons are filled with many people who are bad and have the potential to harm others (prisoners). When in the real world, the ratio of friendly people to bad people is very high compared to prison, since the whole prison is an area full of people who have committed negative acts and the real world is filled with a larger amount of