During the 2022 legislative session, the Georgia Legislature created the Senate Study Committee on Unsheltered Homelessness to develop “specific recommendations on the enforcement of bans on camping and sleeping in public spaces, new types of state and local contracts with homeless nonprofit organizations, and the necessity for new state laws dealing with homelessness.” While the committee was supposed to undertake a comprehensive look at the issue of homelessness, it declined to address the issue of the criminalization of people experiencing homelessness.

This report, Sheltering Injustice: A Call for Georgia to Stop Criminalizing People Experiencing Homelessness fills the gap left by the committee’s decision by outlining how Georgia’s current criminalization of those experiencing homelessness has a lasting harmful effect – particularly on the state’s Black communities and other communities of color.