Durham and Mecklenburg County are quietly running one of the most closely watched social experiments in North Carolina: small guaranteed-income pilots for people walking out of prison. Early results are getting attention, with sharper housing stability and low re-arrest rates showing up in the data so far. The basic idea is simple. Give people a modest monthly stipend, roughly $600 to $700, pair it with peer support and budgeting workshops, then study whether that extra cushion helps break the expensive cycle of reincarceration. Officials stress these projects are intentionally small and time-limited, designed to build local evidence before anyone talks about scaling up or locking in recurring funding.
Mecklenburg’s RAMP Up Shows Early Housing Gains
Mecklenburg County rolled out RAMP Up (Reentry Assistance Mobility Program) in July 2024 after commissioners carved out $500,000 for the effort, according to Mecklenburg County. The county is giving $600 a month for a year to 60 randomly selected residents, requiring a financial-literacy workshop, and tracking an equal-sized comparison group to see what actually changes.
County data reported in local coverage show that by the end of the year, 69 percent of recipients were living in permanent, stable housing compared with 47 percent of the comparison group. About 5 percent of participants had been re-arrested and returned to custody, according to North Carolina Health News. For a relatively small pilot, those numbers are exactly the kind of early signal policymakers like to see.
Durham Mixes Cash With Choice And Peer Support
Durham’s ROOTED pilot sits inside the city’s Community Safety Department and served about 107 residents in its first program year. Participants receive $8,400 over 12 months and can either take steady $700 monthly payments or opt for a front-loaded schedule. That choice comes paired with optional peer support, according to the city website.
Durham did not stop at just cutting checks. The city teamed up with researchers through the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law to run SAFE HOPE, a study that will dig into how the payment structure affects health, stability and recidivism. The whole effort builds on an earlier Excel pilot that provided $600 a month to 109 formerly incarcerated people and was evaluated by the Center for Guaranteed Income Research at the University of Pennsylvania.
Why Policymakers Are Watching The Math
State numbers explain why local governments are sweating the details. An April 2026 Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission analysis found that roughly 41 percent of people released from state prison in fiscal year 2023 were re-arrested within two years, and 37 percent were sent back to prison. At the same time, the state’s Department of Adult Correction reports an average daily incarceration cost of about $149.92 per person, which works out to more than $54,000 a year.
Put bluntly, even a modest dent in those re-incarceration rates can translate into very large public savings. That is the financial argument sitting underneath what might otherwise look like a simple cash-aid program.
What Researchers Hope To Learn
Researchers plan to compare people receiving payments to matched applicants who do not, tracking housing, employment, health and criminal-justice outcomes to see which levers actually move the needle. Earlier evaluation of the Excel program found that recipients were more likely to maintain full-time work and to report higher food security and housing stability, according to the Center for Guaranteed Income Research.
Local policymakers, along with the organizations that helped launch the pilots, point to those findings as a key reason they set aside local funds to keep testing the model. Municipal summaries and practitioner-focused reporting frame these current efforts as the next phase in seeing whether guaranteed income can reliably support reentry.
What To Watch Next
Mecklenburg officials say RAMP Up just started its third cohort on July 1, 2026, and that county leaders will pull together multi-year results before deciding whether to make the pilot permanent, as reported by North Carolina Health News. In Durham, staff have flagged in budget presentations that ROOTED is winding down even as Welcome Home reentry services continue and researchers complete the SAFE HOPE study.
That leaves elected officials with a familiar but high-stakes question. If one year of modest cash support can help people stay housed and avoid a return to prison that costs more than $54,000 annually, local leaders say the return on investment could be hard to ignore. For now, the final answer will come from the numbers.
