CENTRAL FLORIDA — Every month in central Florida, taxpayers are spending thousands of dollars to lock people up for sleeping outside.
A day or two later, those same people are back out sleeping on the streets, and the cycle is repeated again and again.
To see just how many are calling the pavement home at night, Channel 9's Lori Brown took to the streets herself.
Brown watched at 10:30 p.m. on a Friday as hundreds of men and women turned the city's concrete into a mattress, but it's illegal to do in Orlando.
Ronald Hines learned that the hard way.
"I got arrested for sleeping on the streets," he said. "I went to jail. They gave me a court cost, a court cost I could not pay, because I wasn't working."
Later, Hines was arrested again for the unpaid fine.
Advocates said the sleeping arrests only give the homeless more problems. It starts with fines they can't pay. Then, their driver's license is suspended, and they get a label, making it that much harder to get a job and climb out of homelessness.
"It's like a hole they can't stop digging," said Brad Sefter of Health Care for the Homeless.
Sefter started a database to track homeless arrests.
"There are 465 on here now, and I just started doing this like six months ago," he said.
"It's easy to see the problem when you're at the jail and you see the number of people who are in there solely because of the fact that they don't have a house," said public defender Bob Weasley.
Channel 9 found Orlando police and the Orange County Jail don't track the number of arrests for sleeping outside, so there's no way to tell how much it's costing taxpayers.
"Anytime you have a court case, you're going to have judge with a graduate degree, two lawyers there, bailiffs in the courtroom, court reporters, you've got to have a court all to solve the problem," said Weasley.
A Volusia County judge was able to dig through records and found homeless arrests are costing that county millions.
Andrae Bailey is in charge of the agency tasked with ending homelessness. He said he'd like to see the money spent locking people up for this used to provide more housing.
"There's only so many days you can stay up when you don't have a home of your own," he said.
"We all is human. We're trying to live, too," said Hines.
Hines is one of the few who's managed to break the cycle. It started with having a place to sleep at the Coalition for the Homeless.
He's now a bell ringer for the Salvation Army.
WFTV
