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safety net
I Returned Home From Prison With Nothing; Here’s What Helped Me Rebuild
Programs like the Returning Citizens Stimulus don’t just improve lives—they reduce unnecessary incarceration and save public funds.
Apr 23, 2025
In April of 2020, one of us was navigating reentry during a global pandemic, while the other was working to implement the largest-ever cash assistance program specifically for people returning from incarceration. With the publication of groundbreaking research, five years later, we know that cash assistance has a positive impact on public safety. It’s time to scale this proven strategy to California’s recidivism challenges.
Karina:
I grew up in Los Angeles, where 1 in 3 children grow up in poverty. Despite a loving mother, I was placed in the foster care system at an early age—a system known to be a pipeline to incarceration. During my third pregnancy I was incarcerated, and I spent the next three years trying to figure out how I would support my family when I got out. With no savings and limited resources, I had no idea how I would get back on my feet.
Without any support for essentials like food, rent, or even a cellphone, the challenge of rebuilding a life is insurmountable.
The pandemic forced employers to go remote. I didn’t have access to a computer or money to buy one, and I didn’t have a clue on how I would afford housing. My kids have pulmonary issues, and I couldn’t see or live with them without risking exposure.
While incarcerated, I learned about the Returning Citizens Stimulus (RCS), a first-of-its-kind initiative launched by the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO). RCS offered financial support to people returning from incarceration. I received $2,750 in installments over two months after my release.
RCS cash made all the difference because getting and keeping a job right out of prison was nearly impossible. I applied to a job at a warehouse known for hiring justice-impacted people. I was fired on my day off because of my time in prison. For people like me this experience is commonplace. Without any support for essentials like food, rent, or even a cellphone, the challenge of rebuilding a life is insurmountable.
RCS covered my immediate needs, such as new clothes, transportation, and I could pay off my restitution. It even allowed me to take my kids out for a meal for the first time in three years. Today, I’m a member of CEO’s policy and advocacy team, where I’ve been able to use my story to advocate for direct cash assistance.
Sam:
In April 2020, when many justice-impacted people, like Karina, were locked out of government support, CEO—being one of the largest reentry services providers in the nation—conceived of and implemented RCS. The program delivered $24 million in direct cash payments to over 10,000 people returning from incarceration.
Research nonprofit MDRC’s most recent independent evaluation of the RCS program in Los Angeles and Alameda counties found that RCS reduced parole violations by nearly 15% for up to a year after enrollment with noteworthy statistical significance—meaning we can be almost certain it was the cash assistance that drove the outcomes. Parole is a costly and punitive system that accounts for 27% of all admissions to state and federal prisons and costs the U.S. over $10 billion annually.
Programs like RCS prove that a small investment at a critical time can lead to transformational change—for individuals, for families, and for entire communities.
Programs like RCS don’t just improve lives—they reduce unnecessary incarceration and save public funds. A short-term financial intervention had long-term impacts on reducing both violent and technical parole violations. It’s simple: When people have the resources to succeed, they don’t cycle back into the system.
Prop 36 is primed to roll back California’s progress in reducing its incarcerated population. More people are likely to go to prison, and less money will be directed towards reentry. The need to invest in solutions proven to halt the revolving door of incarceration have never been more necessary. California has already implemented direct cash assistance before and has a whole host of organizations ready to put it in action once again.
The governor and lawmakers must renew funding for Helping Justice-Involved Reenter Employment (HIRE). This program, set to sunset this fiscal year, has already distributed more than $500,000 in needs-based payments to justice-impacted people across the state, pairing cash support with pathways to good jobs.
Programs like RCS prove that a small investment at a critical time can lead to transformational change—for individuals, for families, and for entire communities.
Karina:
RCS offered me agency to determine my own career path. I could provide for my family while also pursuing a fulfilling job. As someone who was able to build a life through RCS, it is my responsibility to push for programs, like HIRE, that will have a lasting and significant impact on the future of my city, my state, and people returning home.
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Social Security Advantage: Trump and Musk’s Evil Plan to Privatize Our Safety Net
The goal is to make interacting with Social Security such a difficult and painful process that retired Americans will get angry with the government and begin to listen to Republicans and Wall Street bankers who tell us they should run the system.
Mar 06, 2025
Tuesday night, U.S. President Donald Trump stood before the nation and, with the full backing of billionaires like Elon Musk, laid the groundwork for the biggest heist in American history—the rapid, systematic destruction of Social Security, disguised as “reform.”
We saw the formal announcement of it during Trump’s State of the Union address, and the DOGE announcement earlier in the week that 7,000 employees at Social Security are to be immediately laid off—with as many as half of all Social Security employees (an additional 30,000 people)—soon to be on the chopping block.
Republicans and their morbidly rich donors have hated Social Security ever since it was first created in 1935. They’ve called it everything from communism to socialism to a Ponzi scheme.
It took Bush almost three years to convince Congress to start the process of privatizing and ultimately destroying Medicare. Having learned from that process, odds are Trump will try to privatize Social Security within the year.
In fact, it has been the most successful anti-poverty program in the history of America, one now emulated by virtually every democracy in the world.
But the right-wing billionaires hate it for several reasons.
The first and most important reason is that it demonstrates that government can actually work for people and society: That then provides credibility for other government programs that billionaires hate even more, like regulating their pollution, breaking up their monopolies, making their social media platforms less toxic, and preventing them from ripping off average American consumers.
Thus, to get political support for gutting regulatory agencies that keep billionaires and their companies from robbing, deceiving, and poisoning us, they must first convince Americans that government is stupid, clumsy, and essentially evil.
Former President Ronald Reagan began that process when he claimed that government was not the solution to our problems but was, in fact, the cause of our problems. It was a lie then and is a lie now, but the billionaire-owned media loved it and it’s been repeated hundreds of millions of times.
Billionaires also know that for Social Security to survive and prosper, morbidly rich people will eventually have to pay the same percentage of their income into it as bus drivers, carpenters, and people who work at McDonald’s.
Right now, people earning over $176,100 pay absolutely nothing into Social Security once that amount has been covered. To make Social Security solvent for the next 75 years, and even give a small raise to everybody on it, the simple fix is for the rich to just start paying Social Security income on all of their income, rather than only the first $176,100.
The entire solvency and health of Social Security could be cured permanently, in other words, if we simply did away with the “billionaire loophole” in the Social Security tax.
But the idea of having to pay a tax on all their income so that middle class and low income people can retire comfortably fills America’s billionaires with dread and disgust. So much so that not one single Republican publicly supports the idea.
How dare Americans have the temerity, they argue, to demand morbidly rich people help support the existence of an American middle class or help keep orphans and severely disabled people from being thrown out on the streets!
Which is why Elon Musk and his teenage hackers are attacking the Social Security Administration and its employees with such gusto.
By firing thousands of employees, their evil plan is to make interacting with Social Security such a difficult and painful process—involving months to make an appointment and hours or even days just to get someone on the telephone—that retired Americans will get angry with the government and begin to listen to Republicans and Wall Street bankers who tell us they should run the system.
(This won’t be limited to Social Security, by the way; as you’re reading these words Trump and Musk are planning to slash 80,000 employees from the Veterans Administration, with a scheme to dump those who served in our military into our private, for-profit hospital and health insurance systems.)
The next step will be to roll out the Social Security version of Medicare Advantage, the privatized version of Medicare that former President George W. Bush created in 2003. That scam makes hundreds of billions of dollars in profits for giant insurance companies, who then kick some of that profit back to Republican politicians as campaign donations and luxury trips to international resorts.
Advantage programs are notorious for screwing people when they get sick, and for ripping off our government to the tune of billions every year. But every effort at reforming Medicare or stopping the Medicare Advantage providers from denying us care and stealing from our government has been successfully blocked by bought-off Republicans in Congress.
Once Republicans have damaged the staffing of the Social Security Administration so badly that people are screaming about the difficult time they’re having signing up, solving problems or errors, or even getting their checks, right-wing media will begin to promote—with help from GOP politicians and the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News”—people opting out of Social Security and going with a private option that resembles private 401(k)s.
Rumor has it they’ll call it “Social Security Advantage” and, like Medicare Advantage, which is administered for massive profits by the insurance giants, it will be run by giant, trillion-dollar banks out of New York.
While big insurance companies have probably made something close to a trillion dollars in profits out of our tax dollars from Medicare Advantage since George W. Bush rolled out the program, Social Security Advantage could make that profit level look like chump change for the big banks.
And, as an added bonus, billionaires and right-wing media will get to point out how hard it is to deal with the now-crippled Social Security administration and argue that it’s time to relieve them, too, of the regulatory burdens of “big government”: Gut or even kill off the regulatory agencies and make their yachts and private jets even more tax deductible than they already are.
This is why Donald Trump repeated Elon Musk’s lies about 200 year-old people getting Social Security checks and the system being riddled with fraud and waste. In fact, Social Security is one of the most secure and fraud-free programs in American history.
But Tuesday night was just the opening salvo. It took Bush almost three years to convince Congress to start the process of privatizing and ultimately destroying Medicare.
Having learned from that process, odds are Trump will try to privatize Social Security within the year.
And he may well get away with it, unless we can wake up enough people to this coming scam and put enough political pressure—particularly on Republicans—to prevent it from happening.
Tag, you’re it.
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Trump’s Freeze Was a Brazen, Unlawful Attempt to Steal Our Tax Dollars
Whichever way this pans out, one thing is clear: This administration is trying every tactic—legal or otherwise—to fund its planned massive tax handout to its billionaire backers.
Jan 30, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump caused panic and chaos when his Office on Management and Budget ordered a sweeping freeze on federal funding for programs American families rely on.
The backlash was fast and fierce as programs ranging from Medicaid to Meals on Wheels to cancer research were impacted. By the end of the day, a federal judge had temporarily “frozen the freeze”—and the following day, the administration reluctantly revoked it.
But make no mistake: This was an attempt to force unconstitutional cuts to vital services that our taxes paid for. Programs that help Americans get food, housing, education, healthcare, and more have been plunged into uncertainty. And the administration’s efforts to use whatever means necessary to line their own pockets by picking ours are just beginning.
The White House will keep pushing the envelope to grab as much power as they can to fleece working people and enrich its billionaire backers.
In this case, the administration told agencies their funding would be frozen until they could prove they were “supporting activities consistent with the president’s policies and requirements”—and not “Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies,” whatever that means.
A sloppy, two-page memo from the Office on Management and Budget exempted Social Security and Medicare in a footnote, along with “assistance directly to individuals.” But much of that assistance goes through programs or nonprofits that reported disruptions after the memo came out.
All 50 state Medicaid offices, for example, immediately reported losing access to the federal Medicaid payment portal. Portals for Head Start, housing programs, after-school programs, some charter schools, and Special Olympics funding were also disrupted.
First Focus on Children estimated that over $300 billion in funding for children’s well-being was at stake. And a spokesperson for Meals on Wheels told HuffPost reporter Arthur Delaney that seniors were panicked “not knowing where their next meals will come from.”
All told, over 2,000 federal programs were put at risk. Alongside those for food, healthcare, education, and housing, experts worried domestic abuse shelters, suicide prevention services, disaster relief, small business funding, childcare, and much, much more could also be impacted.
These programs are lifelines for families—and cuts to them are enormously unpopular among voters. For instance, 81% of Americans oppose cuts to Medicaid, while around 70% or more oppose cuts to SNAP, Head Start, childcare, and housing assistance.
This was a brazen, unlawful attempt to steal our tax dollars. And it was an assault on our democracy as well as our families. The Constitution gives Congress alone the authority to pass laws and appropriate funds, not the president.
Whichever way this pans out, one thing is clear: This administration is trying every tactic—legal or otherwise—to fund its planned massive tax handout to its billionaire backers. And this won’t be the last attempt—even after the memo to agencies was pulled back, Trump’s press secretary tweeted, “This is NOT a rescission of the federal funding freeze.”
Meanwhile, the administration is still trying to cancel funding for green jobs, infrastructure, and climate that our lawmakers already approved— which amounts to more theft of our tax dollars. And future budget proposals will pair tax cuts for corporations and billionaires with harsh service cuts for the rest of us.
The White House will keep pushing the envelope to grab as much power as they can to fleece working people and enrich its billionaire backers. Our families deserve better. And fast.
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