Caught in the Open: Why My Friends Keep Going to Jail While I Stay Free by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.

                                                                     Caught in the Open: 

Why My Friends Keep Going to Jail While I Stay Free

Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.,D

Junior was lying in a doorway on State Street, shivering against the concrete without even a blanket. No sleeping bag, no backpack, no pillow — just the thin layer of his clothes against the cold. I will never forget the sight. He looked more like a discarded bundle than a human being. Within a week, the police arrested him for shoplifting a sandwich. Two weeks later, he was back in jail again. That same month, my other three closest friends were locked up too. All of us share co-occurring disorders — mental distress and substance use — yet I am free while they are behind bars. And the difference? I have a home.

This pattern is not random. When housed people use drugs, lose their tempers, or struggle with mental health symptoms, they usually do it indoors, out of view. Unhoused people do not have that luxury. Their crises play out in public, where every passerby — and every police cruiser — can see. That visibility means they are constantly criminalized for behaviors that housed people can hide. I want to make sense of this injustice, and think through how we might finally end it.

Let me tell you about my friends.

Texas, 29, from Texas, lives with schizophrenia. Unlike the others, he goes to jail less often, maybe because he has no probation terms attached to his name. But he still struggles to stay stable without consistent care, bouncing between encampments and shelters, at the mercy of a system that offers no real continuity.

Daniel, meanwhile, cycles through jail about ten times a year. Police spot him on the street, know his history, and pull him over on sight. They almost always find a pipe or a tiny shard of meth. It amazes me that Daniel even bothers carrying anything at all — but then again, where would he leave it? When you have no home, everything you own is on your body. There is no bedside table or bathroom drawer, only your pockets.

Eric gets a small SSI check, which should give him stability. But with no affordable housing available, he still lives outside, carrying his paraphernalia with him, constantly vulnerable to being searched and arrested.

And Junior — the friend in the doorway — has faced the worst. His arrests used to lead to short jail stints, but now prosecutors bundle his petty misdemeanor charges into felonies, raising the stakes and threatening him with prison. I once called the District Attorney’s office to protest the tens of thousands spent on repeated prosecutions, while no one would help Junior get a pair of eyeglasses or food stamps. Eventually, the probation outreach team started checking on him, but they could do little without stable housing and flexible treatment. Junior did try a dual-diagnosis program in Los Angeles, but it was a poor fit and he left.

What all four have in common is that they live their struggles in public. I face many of the same challenges — mental health symptoms, drug use, despair — but I am behind a locked door. Police do not see me. The public does not see me. So I stay free, while they get locked up. That is not justice; it is simply a matter of who gets to suffer behind walls, and who suffers in the open.

Policing is the sharpest edge of this system. Officers know the faces, the probation lists, the “problem” corners. They repeatedly target unhoused people who cannot hide their pain. If you are housed, you can take a break from a mental health spiral in private. If you are unhoused, your breakdown is everybody’s business.

And even when people want to comply with probation or treatment, it is practically impossible on the street. You cannot reliably check in when you have no phone, no calendar, no ride, no place to store your paperwork. You cannot “avoid known users” when they are the only people who will sit with you under the freeway ramp. The system is designed for people with resources — not people with nothing.

I want to name solutions beyond simply “more housing” — though housing, of course, is the foundation. We should expand permanent supportive housing with low-barrier entry, meaning no requirement for total abstinence, no endless paperwork, no long waitlists. We should fully fund street-based mental health outreach, including psychiatric nurse practitioners who can treat people where they are, not just in clinics. We should reform probation to stop the revolving door of technical violations, and instead allow “earned compliance credits” for positive progress, even if people slip sometimes. Finally, we need to decriminalize possession of personal-use amounts of drugs and related paraphernalia, redirecting those cases to health-oriented responses rather than jail. These changes would give people a fair chance to heal, not just punish them over and over for surviving.

I believe these steps are achievable. They are far cheaper than endlessly cycling people through jail and court, and they honor the basic dignity of every human being, housed or not.

When I look at my friends, I see good people — people who are traumatized, trying to calm the storms of their lives with whatever they can find. None of them is a threat to public safety. Their so-called “crimes” are small acts of survival, magnified by poverty and exposure. But our system acts as if being unhoused is itself a crime — punishing these men for having nowhere to go, nowhere to hide, and no one to help them.

Some days I wonder how long it will take for public opinion to change. I wonder how many times I will have to tell these stories. And yet I will keep telling them. I will keep showing up in court, making phone calls to the probation department, sitting with my friends when they get out, trying to find them socks, or food, or a ride to a meeting. Because I know that until something shifts, the revolving jail door will keep turning, and their lives will stay stuck in a cycle of harm.

If there is one core truth I have seen over and over, it is this: housing is harm reduction. Housing is health care. Housing is freedom. Without it, all other efforts collapse. With it, so much more becomes possible.

Tonight, my friends are in jail, again. I am not. That should haunt all of us — and push us to build something better, because nothing changes until we demand it and refuse to look away.