The meeting began with a September Lateral Learning Poll in which the participants were able to vote for what it is they want the organization to focus on and what they want to learn about in the month of September. Some ideas presented for the September Lateral Learning Session were: Ubi for parents and caregivers – child tax credits, UBI for workers – EITC, UBI for excluded workers, UBI from an international perspective, UBI for teens aging out of foster care, UBI and housing, and other topics.
The focus of the meeting was on the guest panelists from Community Spring, in Gainesville, Florida who recently started a basic income pilot program in Alachua County Florida. The panelists were Lindsay Kallman, the Executive Director and Kevin Scott, one of the program fellows.
Community Springs is a nonprofit focused on dismantling structural poverty and spurring economic mobility at a grassroots level; and the two focal points of the organization are providing income and building power. To achieve this goal, Community Spring hires fellows who have been impacted by poverty to help solve the systematic problems they identify as driving poverty in their communities.
The guaranteed income program began initially as a program inspired by the first group of fellows who decided to focus on reentry support, however, when COVID hit, Community Spring decided to pivot off this initial idea into a direct cash assistance program. They gave $300 to anyone who was on SNAP and at random.
Just Income GNV;Guaranteed Income for Justice-Impacted People (based in Gainesville, Florida) is a new guaranteed pilot program implemented by Community Springs (CS) in partnership with their local authorities, that focuses on providing financial aid to formerly and recently incarcerated individuals.
Community Springs Fellow, Leader of Just Income GNV, Kevin Scott, presented the first half of materials.
Brief overview of the incarceration rates in the United States and why Community Springs decided to focus its pilot program on recently incarcerated individuals.
The United States has an incarceration rate of 698 per 100,000 population. In comparison to the other founding NATO countries, its rate of incarceration is times higher. We are incarcerating people, nationally, at a rate higher than any other country on the planet. The United States has 25% of the entire planet’s prisoners. Florida’s incarceration rates are even higher at 833 per 100,000. There are 143 state correctional facilities and 12 federal prisons in Florida, making it the third largest corrections system in the country. 2% out of all adults in Florida are currently under or some form of corrections at any given time.
The Cost of Incarceration:
Families spend $3 billion a year on food and phone calls alone. FL prisoners earn $0, commissary is gouged, medical attention must be paid for, communication is monetized, and distanced visits to incarcerated individuals is expensive.
Prison Goes Beyond the Wall:
Formerly incarcerated people face many obstacles not often known by those who have never been impacted by the system or studied it.
- 27% Unemployment
- 10x homelessness rate
- Families with low income, stability
- Fines and fees
- Mental health challenges.
The fastest growing population in prisons are women of color particularly Black women. Most of the prison penalties and payments made while incarcerated come from women of color. Women of color are also the fastest growing and most impacted group following incarceration.
For many formerly incarcerated individuals, their first night out of the prison is in the parking lot of a homeless shelter. Finding housing after incarceration is a tremendous hurdle that first-time former inmates are immediately faced with following their release, a hurdle when combined with the limited job opportunity and other obstacles only becomes even more difficult to navigate if they are incarcerated more than once.
“Too poor to be free.”
25% of all local probation violations that resulted in released individuals being sent back to prison were all probation violations due to lack of money. All these factors only become heightened if an individual has been incarcerated more than once.
Soul Murder – the Struggle with Mental Health for Incarcerated and Formerly Incarcerated People
“Destroying of someone’s personality, the sense of their own aliveness.”
A lot of people struggle with mental health during their incarceration and following their release. Common struggles that formerly incarcerated individuals have following their release from prison are disbelief, anxiety, depression, reactive substance abuse, nightmares, flashbacks, hypervigilance, an overall feeling of still being incarcerated, as well as institutionalized personality traits.
Racial and ethnic disparities in prisons and jails in Florida
Whites are grossly underrepresented in the Sunshine states’ incarcerated population, while Blacks are heavily overrepresented. Although people of color only make up 16% of Florida’s population, they make up 46% of the states’ prison population.
In Alachua County, where Community Springs is based, Black people are incarcerated at a rate 9x higher than white people. Over 2% of the Black population are behind bars at any given time, compared to 0.46% of the non-Hispanic, white population.
Lindsay presented on the functionality and logistics of the GNV Pilot Program
The Basics
Guaranteed income is an unconditional monthly cash payment given directly to individuals, no strings attached and no work requirements. Community Springs pilot is the only one in the country for justice-impacted people by justice-impacted people.
The pilot program will be 12 months long and individuals will receive a payment of $1,000 their first month, and $600 per month for the 11 subsequent months. The amount of payment for the first month numbers were determined after evaluating the immediate needs of former incarcerated peoples. For the 11 months following, the amount was the number that was reflected in CS’s previous short-term cash assistance program that they had begun before and during the beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic, in which they provided individuals with cash payments of $300 a month and received numerous feedbacks advising that an amount double that would have been more effective and should be considered in the future.
Eligibility
Anyone released from Alachua County Jail with a felony charge, Florida state or federal prison, or who has begun felony probation in Alachua County within six months from the first disbursement is eligible to apply. The reason for not including those with misdemeanors is because the systematic challenges that those with misdemeanors face are not as impactful when compared to those who have felony records.
Community Springs Community Partners
Although CS believes the city government would be fairly amenable to this pilot program as they passed the resolution to bring it to Gainesville, the environment CS is located within is openly hostile to incarcerated individuals and those with felony records or charges, therefore they have been very intentional in not taking public dollars. The budget for the first year of this pilot is only $1.2 million and the sample size is around 115 people. The main goal of this first year is as a trial run to prove its usefulness and effectiveness on this smaller scale, so that it can hopefully be expanded full scale in its second year. While the scale of this program is much smaller than any pilot program in the District of Columbia may end up being, there are still many factors, trails and errors that DC advocates and MON can learn from in the creation of a DC pilot program.
How do the partners assist the program?
Some of the institutions and programs that CS is partnered with include Mayors for a Guaranteed Income, Steady, University of Pennsylvania, and Varo. Mayors for Guaranteed Income is CS’s pilot program’s main funder. UPenn conducts the research for the pilot and will be conducting the final evaluation sounding the pilot. Steady is the method that will be used for the disbursements. It is a third-party intermediary that will serve as a liaison between the pilot and the participants banks. To assess data and collect evidence of how important a program like this is, they will also be collecting data on the flow of funds to be included in the final assessment of the pilot at the end of the first year. Varo is an online banking company that CS has built a partnership with through Steady. Because many formerly incarcerated individuals with felony records are barred from traditional banks and banking methods, CS decided to partner with Varo to ensure that those who cannot bank traditionally would still be able to have access to this program and the support.
Lindsay concluded the Community Spring’s GNV presentation with a section on the evaluation of the program and specifics that they plan to research through the program.
Evaluation
A key focal part of this pilot program is to produce a body of literature that demonstrates the clear intersection between poverty and the incarcerable system. If a clear connection can be made between poverty and the probation system and systems of control, it will be monumental in the creation, implementation and growth of more pilot programs like this one and hopefully lead to major changes in the justice system and probation system. CS also wants to determine if a guaranteed income can mitigate known barriers to successful reentry and unlock the potential of justice-impacted people in Alachua County, Florida.
Some of the research conducted in this program will assess the following:
| Research Question | Outcome Measure | Also used in: |
| Does guaranteed income reduce recidivism? | DOC records: prospective new offense, parole violation, arrests contact with law enforcement. Retrospective from 18 years of age to present. | Most Criminal Justice studies |
| Does guaranteed income promote housing security? | Living situation/neighborhood module of Western’s Boston Reentry Study | Urban Institute’s longitudinal Returning Home Study |
| Does guaranteed income reduce the criminalization of poverty? | DOC records: Repeated measures of fines and fees associated with release. | Western’s studies |
| Does guaranteed income mediate rejection sensitivity and promote positive identity? | Rejection Sensitivity Scale-Adult & Adult Mattering Scale | Naft & Downey, 2019; Bodecka, et al, 2021 |
More information on Just Income GNV can be found at www.csgnv.org, or contact Kevin Scott at kscott@csgnv.org.
Following the conclusion of their presentation, the Zoom meeting opened for questions and broke into several small groups to discuss participants thoughts and brainstorm/discuss potential ways that a pilot program could be initiated in DC.