By Rachel Crumpler
James Earquhart, 66, walked out of prison in December.
After 15 years behind bars, he suddenly had to find a place to stay, look for work and figure out a way to rebuild his life.
“It’s a lot of complications getting out and not having anything to come to,” Earquhart said.
About a month later, he got a call with unexpected good news: His name had been drawn in a lottery for a new pilot program in Durham named ROOTED (Resources & Opportunities for Ongoing Transition, Empowerment & Dignity).
Earquhart is among 107 formerly incarcerated people living in Durham getting monthly financial assistance through the program — $8,400 over the course of a year. Participants must earn no more than 60 percent of area median income, have spent at least nine consecutive months incarcerated and have been released after Jan. 1, 2024.
Earquhart has used the money to pay rent at a transitional house, buy clothes and cover other necessities. While working a landscaping job, he said the program’s monthly payments have helped ease the financial strain of starting over.
“Without it, right at this point in time, I would probably be out there on the street,” he said.
Every year, more than 18,000 people are released from North Carolina state prisons, and thousands of others leave county jails. Many return to their communities without the resources or support needed to rebuild their lives and face barriers to basic needs such as housing, employment and health care.
The city of Durham, along with Mecklenburg County, is testing whether guaranteed income can help formerly incarcerated people stabilize their lives and reduce costly cycles of recidivism.
An April 2026 report from the North Carolina Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission found that 41 percent of nearly 12,000 people released from North Carolina state prisons in fiscal year 2023 were re-arrested within two years, and 37 percent were sent back to prison.
This revolving door into prison has a steep price: Housing one person in a North Carolina prison costs taxpayers more than $54,000 per year.
With incarceration carrying financial and community costs, Durham and Mecklenburg officials are exploring whether guaranteed income can be a cost-effective way to help people succeed after release and thus reduce the need for future spending.
Early outcomes are encouraging, program leaders say, and they’re going to keep tracking the results to help government officials decide whether to keep funding the initiatives.
“Our goal is to stabilize, to bring a greater sense of well-being and to ultimately reduce or eliminate recidivism,” said Shannon Delaney from Durham’s Community Safety Department, which is overseeing the ROOTED program.
Looking for reentry support? Check out our resource page.
Why guaranteed income?
Guaranteed income programs provide unrestricted, recurring cash payments to people to boost their financial stability. In recent years, local governments across the nation have launched such programs with varying payment amounts, duration and populations served, including pregnant women and people experiencing homelessness.
While critics question this use of public funds, a growing body of research suggests guaranteed income programs reduce financial stress, improve mental and physical health outcomes and increase housing and food security. Recipients primarily spend the money on groceries, rent and debt reduction.
Lauren Brinkley-Rubinstein, who studies incarceration and health, is part of a multidisciplinary team of researchers from Duke University that is evaluating Durham’s ROOTED program.
Only a handful of guaranteed income programs, she said, have specifically focused on serving formerly incarcerated people. It’s a population that faces steep economic barriers because many leave incarceration with little or no savings, and their criminal records hurt their chances of finding jobs. Only 37 percent of people released from state prisons in 2024 reported employment within a year after their release date, according to N.C. Department of Commerce data. Their median wages were just $8,518.
“I think it’s particularly important for this population,” Brinkley-Rubinstein said. “The experience of incarceration is so destabilizing, that when people leave, it is very difficult to find a job.
“Giving people a small amount of cash, relative to what it takes to survive, I think can go a really long way.”
Durham officials aren’t starting the ROOTED program from scratch. In March 2022, the city launched a similar one-year guaranteed income pilot program called Excel as part of Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, a nationwide initiative. The pilot, funded mostly by a donation from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and other private donors, provided $600 per month in unconditional cash payments to 109 formerly incarcerated participants.
Researchers at the Center for Guaranteed Income Research at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy & Practice evaluated the program. Their 82-page report published in February 2025 found recipients were significantly more likely to maintain full-time employment and had higher food security and housing stability, compared with the control group not receiving payments. Recipients also reported less difficulty abstaining from substances, staying away from criminal activity and avoiding probation or parole violations.
After seeing those results, Durham City Council members allocated $1 million to launch another one-year guaranteed income program.
“Our goal is shared prosperity, and so one way to do that is to make sure people who have the toughest time finding housing and jobs have some support to give them a little bit longer runway to find that,” Durham City Council member Carl Rist told NC Health News. “It’s both to really provide that support for individuals, but also we know, as a community, it’s one way to reduce crime.”
While Rist acknowledges there are skeptics of guaranteed income, he argues the investment is worthwhile and cost-effective if one year of supplemental income helps prevent the steeper public cost of reincarceration.
ROOTED gives participants a choice between two payment structures: steady monthly payments of $700 or larger payments at the beginning of the program that taper over the course of the year. Researchers hope the comparison will show whether one option is more successful than the other, which could shape future guaranteed income programs.
Jesse Lopez, a research scientist at the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law who is evaluating the ROOTED program, said the payment structures were selected fairly evenly by participants.
“Those who chose the larger upfront payment described using it to just get rid of some immediate obstacles, like they needed to repair a vehicle, they needed to reinstate a driver’s license, they needed to put down a down payment or deposit for rent,” Lopez said. “Other people were trying to be very strict and were thinking in terms of a budget and wanting to create stability and plans, so they can avoid overspending and build long-term financial discipline.”
At the start of the study, Lopez said a large number of participants were dealing with food, housing and financial instability.
Lopez doesn’t expect guaranteed income to eliminate every barrier participants face, but he hopes studying the results will show where the payments make the biggest difference. Researchers will compare participants’ outcomes to those of applicants not selected for the program.
Mecklenburg tests the approach
Mecklenburg County, home to North Carolina’s largest jail, is testing a similar initiative. More than 1,000 people returned to the county from state prison in 2025.
Sonya Harper, who has led Mecklenburg County’s Criminal Justice Services for a decade, said many people seeking reentry assistance arrive with “next to nothing.”
“They don’t have housing plans, they don’t have any source of income or job or anything, and that’s our starting point,” Harper said.
Criminal Justice Services launched RAMP Up (Reentry Assistance Mobility Program) in July 2024 after Mecklenburg County commissioners allocated $500,000 for the pilot program. The program provides $600 a month for a year to 60 randomly selected formerly incarcerated Mecklenburg County residents.
Program eligibility is narrower than Durham’s program, as RAMP Up excludes people convicted of certain violent felonies, firearm offenses and sexual offenses. Harper said county leaders intentionally adopted narrower eligibility to reduce the likelihood of public pushback.
Before receiving their first payment, participants had to complete a financial literacy workshop. They also complete quarterly budgets throughout the year. Harper said those requirements are important because they reinforce that the payments are a temporary boost, not permanent assistance participants should come to rely on.
“We settled on it being $600 per month because we wanted it to be enough funding to where it could be impactful and make a change each month, but we didn’t want it to be so much that folks could become dependent on it,” Harper said.
Another 60 residents were selected as a comparison group so county leaders could better measure the program’s impact on reentry outcomes.
Harper said housing outcomes have been one of the clearest signs of the program’s impact. At enrollment, more than two-thirds of RAMP Up participants were living in transitional or temporary housing. By the end of the year, that number was reversed — 69 percent were living in permanent, stable housing. Harper attributes that improvement to many participants putting their payments toward housing.
In contrast, only 47 percent of the comparison group said they had permanent housing at the end of the year, and 13 percent of them said they were homeless.
In the first year of the program, only 5 percent of RAMP Up participants had been re-arrested and were back in custody. Before entering the program, participants had been arrested an average of 8.7 times and had most recently spent an average 49 months incarcerated.
Those initial results convinced county leaders to continue the pilot. The RAMP Up program just started its third cohort July 1, and Harper said data from all three years will be compiled into a report that county commissioners will use to determine whether to make the program permanent with recurring funding.
“If you’re able to meet your basic needs, you’re less likely to be out and reoffend,” Harper said. “This is much less expensive than what it would be to keep somebody housed in either a state prison or even in our county jail.”
That’s been the experience for Earquhart, who said the monthly supplemental income has put him in a better position to rebuild his life.
One of his biggest goals in the coming months is finding an apartment he can afford so he can move out of the congregate transitional housing where he currently pays $175 a week.
“I’m not where I want to be, but I’m getting there,” he said.
The post Can guaranteed income help people leaving incarceration? Two NC local governments are testing it appeared first on North Carolina Health News.
