Hoping for Normal: Inside 200+ Applications for Guaranteed Income

More than 200 people applied to our guaranteed income program last month. One applicant just spent fifteen years inside a Florida prison. When we asked about his hopes for the next year, he wrote: "I hope next year that things will just be normal."

Normal. That's the dream. Not wealth, not success. Just normal.

A woman on disability and probation put it differently: "I would love to feel like I'm not constantly drowning."

Too Poor to Be Free

I walked out of prison penniless and homeless. I know firsthand the terror of realizing that poverty itself threatens your freedom, that if you can't pull off a miracle of stability while making a long list of payments to the state, you're going back into a cage. We call it "too poor to be free." Poverty is not a lack of character. It is a lack of cash.

But even I was shaken by what we found in this year's applications. Nearly half of applicants have no income at all. Not low income. Zero. More than 80% have no savings. And when we looked closer, we found that more than a third have both: no income and no savings. Nothing coming in, nothing stored away. Just nothing.

What does it mean to live on nothing? More than three-quarters have been going hungry, literally starving. The same proportion have no stable housing of their own. One in ten are sleeping outside, in cars, or tents. Nearly half are staying with friends or family, not on any lease, one disagreement away from the street. When we asked about stress, nearly two-thirds said they often or almost always feel overwhelmed. Most have no one to talk to when things get hard.

Nine in ten say their criminal record is the primary barrier to employment. Not motivation. Not skills. The record. We helped pass Gainesville's Fair Chance Hiring ordinance. It helps open some doors, but for many people, the sentence never ends.

One applicant wrote that his hope was "that someone gives me a chance to join their team and be a dependable employee, get a place to live on my own and become a productive citizen and the best father and grandfather I can be."

That's not someone who has given up. That's someone being systematically excluded.

What Actually Works

Traditional reentry can feel like someone is holding you down while telling you to get up. Check in with your officer. Pass the drug test. Pay the fees. Jump through the hoops while you're drowning. Exposed to all that "accountability," people still return to prison at staggering rates. The carceral system releases people with nothing, excludes them from employment and housing, extracts fees they cannot pay, then punishes them for the poverty it created. When recidivism happens, they call it a personal failing. But it's the system working exactly as designed.

At Community Spring, we take the opposite approach with our Just Income program: $800 a month for 12 months, no strings attached. No surveillance, no conditions, no hoops. It is based on trust. For someone with zero income, this is everything. It's the difference between drowning and breathing.

This will be our fourth cohort, bringing our total to 172 participants. We've distributed over $1 million in guaranteed income, directly into the hands of people rebuilding their lives. Just Income was one of the first guaranteed income programs in the country designed specifically for people after incarceration, and one of the only ones validated through a randomized controlled trial.

The results have been clear. In our pilot year, recidivism rates dropped by 31% compared to a control group. This significant reduction demonstrates that unconditional cash succeeds where punitive measures fail.

Participants also became more likely to handle an unexpected $400 expense, less likely to go hungry, more likely to report hope, stability, and stronger family bonds. Some had been cycling in and out of incarceration for decades, trapped in that revolving door of poverty and cages. Just Income was the exit ramp. Even years after their last payment, they've never gone back.

The Choice

When people leave incarceration, they are dropped at the edge of a cliff, precarious from the first moment. Nearly everything works to push them over. We can keep sending ambulances to the bottom of the cliff, at our expense in every way, or we can build a sturdy fence at the top.

We launched our fourth cohort of guaranteed income this month. From more than 200 applications, we selected 15. We select randomly because we’re not in the business of ranking people's desperation. That means more than 190 people who need this support won't receive it. We reached a handful. The rest deserve it too.

The woman who said she feels like she's constantly drowning? She's one of the 15. When we made those calls to share the good news, there were tears, screams of joy, deep relief. One father wants to start a recovery house for others. Another is sleeping in his car, trying to be a better dad to his kid. A young man with no transportation is trying to start a cleaning business. A mother wants to reunify with her children. 

These are people who want what everyone wants: stability, dignity, a chance to finally feel normal.