By Rachel Crumpler
A barren field in Alamance County will be transformed over the next year into North Carolina’s first tiny home community built specifically for formerly incarcerated women — a new approach to post-prison housing in a state where the need for a stable place to land when leaving prison far outpaces the available options.
About 95 percent of the more than 32,000 people in North Carolina prisons will one day return to the community — about 20,000 releases each year. Yet many struggle to secure housing because of stigma, a shortage of affordable housing and landlords who are unwilling to rent to people with criminal records.
By fall 2026, seven colorful tiny homes are expected to stand on a 13-acre property in Graham and be operated by Benevolence Farm, a program that provides transitional housing and employment to women of all conviction types.
The addition will double Benevolence Farm’s housing capacity on the property — a meaningful increase for a program that has maintained a long wait list for years. (A three-bedroom farmhouse already serves six people at a time.)
At a groundbreaking ceremony last month, Benevolence Farm Executive Director Kristen Powers said that the construction of the tiny homes represents a new model of housing for community reentry: an alternative to traditional congregate options that often replicate some of the conditions of incarceration.
Building tiny homes
For Benevolence Farm — which welcomed its first resident in December 2016 — the project has been years in the making. In 2019, a question from a resident who spent more than 20 years in prison shifted the organization’s thinking about what reentry housing could be.
“What would it look like to practice living free and independent amongst a community of people who get me?” Powers recalled the resident, Deb, asking.
The tiny home community is one answer, Powers said — a vision developed over years of planning and “designed from the very beginning with input by formerly incarcerated women.”
Former residents, including Mona Evans, who spent nearly five years incarcerated, played a central role in the design process.
“Every choice we made was about reclaiming what prison took from us: choice and dignity,” Evans said.
Their input shaped the most essential features: no loft beds reminiscent of prison bunks; open floorplans as a contrast to the tight, restrictive spaces of cells; lots of windows to easily see outside after years of limited exposure; a private bathroom in each home to regain privacy while showering and using the bathroom; and each home painted a different color, contrasting with prison uniformity where everyone has the same clothes and shoes.
While the tiny homes will offer independent living, they will be clustered to form a community where residents can lean on each other as they navigate the challenges of reestablishing their life in the community.
“If someone’s struggling, all they have to do is go outside, to their neighbor, to someone who understands what they’re going through,” said Linda Cayton, a former Benevolence Farm resident who now works as a certified peer support specialist.
The tiny home community is expected to cost nearly $1.8 million to complete, Powers said. The North Carolina Housing Finance Agency contributed $1.1 million toward the effort, and additional support is coming from foundations and private donors.
“Safe and sustainable housing for everyone in North Carolina is a goal of our organization,” Adam Abram, chair of the North Carolina Housing Finance Agency, said at the groundbreaking ceremony.
Benevolence Farm’s expansion comes amid a statewide push to expand housing opportunities for the state’s formerly incarcerated population. Homelessness among people leaving prison is high; in 2024, more than one in four people left prison without a stable place to live.
“I hope everyone understands we are not just building tiny homes,” said Evans, who is Benevolence Farm’s community advocacy director. “We are building independence, we are building dignity and we are building futures.”
Housing affects reentry success
Securing safe, stable housing is often the most immediate challenge facing people leaving prison. Without stable housing, it can be hard for people to comply with parole and post-release supervision, access treatment and find employment.
Of the nearly 20,000 people who left a North Carolina state prison in 2024, 5,610 people — or 28 percent — were identified as homeless, according to a housing assessment conducted by The Council of State Governments Justice Center. The nonpartisan organization leads the national Reentry 2030 campaign, which North Carolina joined in January 2024, and developed a statewide strategic plan to bolster reentry support. Expanding housing options is one of the plan’s four overarching goals.
People leaving incarceration were counted as homeless if they had no verified home plan, reported themselves as homeless, provided an intersection as an address or went to a shelter or temporary housing placement.
Most people flagged as homeless after leaving prison — 83 percent or 4,647 people — were released on community supervision, which requires regular check-ins with probation/parole officers. About 95 percent of these individuals — 4,424 people — were released to the street, not to a shelter, to temporary housing or to a treatment program.
Unstable housing increases the risk of recidivism, which can be costly to the legal system, to the carceral system and to taxpayers. Housing one person in a North Carolina prison costs more than $54,000 per year.
Powers stressed that housing is a fundamental need that affects health outcomes and reentry success. A person needs a place to live before they can focus on other tasks, such as addressing any physical and mental health problems and reuniting with family, she said.
A 2023 report on removing housing barriers for formerly incarcerated people published by the Wilson Center for Science and Justice at Duke Law describes a “cyclical relationship between housing instability and the criminal legal system.”
“Guaranteed housing upon release from prison can mean the difference between going back to the lifestyle that led you to your incarceration to begin with,” said Cayton, who spent several years incarcerated. “As someone who was in active addiction and living in the streets prior to my incarceration, having a program like Benevolence [Farm] helped me turn my life around.
“So many people who are trying to reintegrate back into society post-release don’t have a safe and nurturing space to heal and grow.”
That gap is a concern to many stakeholders across the state, including first lady Anna Stein, who was an attorney and policy adviser on the state health department’s drug overdose prevention team before her husband was elected governor. She has made reentry and rehabilitation one of her three priority issues during her husband’s time in office.
“There is dignity in a home and having a place to call your own, to de-stress, to have community and to be yourself,” she said as the keynote speaker at Benevolence Farm’s tiny home community groundbreaking ceremony. “Establishing a network of housing options is a foundational step in giving people reentering their communities the best chance of long term success.”
Need for more women’s reentry resources
Over the past several decades, women’s incarceration has surged nationwide — including in the Tar Heel state.
In North Carolina state prisons, 2,838 women are currently incarcerated — nearly double the number housed there three decades ago, when 1,514 women were behind bars, according to N.C. Department of Adult Correction data. Women now make up almost 9 percent of the state’s prison population of more than 32,000 people.
But Powers said that resources available to support women returning home haven’t kept pace with the growth. Benevolence Farm is one of the few programs in the state dedicated specifically to serving formerly incarcerated women — a population with rising needs.
“Not that we have sufficient programs to serve men reentering the community,” Stein said. “But women have been especially underserved in the reentry space.”
In 2024, 3,048 women were released from North Carolina prisons, accounting for nearly 15 percent of all releases that year, according to Department of Adult Correction data.
Some new options are beginning to emerge. In October, Jubilee Home, a reentry program in Durham, opened a women’s house that offers housing and daily support — including guidance from peer navigators who have experience with the justice system — to four formerly incarcerated women at a time. The launch was supported in part by funding from the state Department of Health and Human Services.
“Our community has a need,” said David Crispell, co-founder and executive director of Jubilee Home, at a ribbon-cutting ceremony celebrating the opening of the new house. “The women that come through this door don’t have to walk this journey alone. It’s a really brave step to come and try to rebuild your life.”
Still, the gap remains wide. Even with seven new tiny homes opening next year, Powers knows the organization will only be able to continue meeting a fraction of the demand for housing. And while she expects the tiny homes to be popular, adding more units is unlikely, as Powers said an architect advised that more homes could compromise the integrity of the rural landscape.
“The theme running through these tiny homes is that it’s not about recreating prison with congregate housing and fitting as many people as you can in the space,” Powers said. “I know it’s tempting to be super efficient and have lots of numbers, but the quality then of people’s experience degrades over time.”
She hopes the expansion will spur broader investment in reentry housing for women across the state — a need she believes is “a solvable problem.”
“We were trailblazing in the sense that we were getting all those cuts and bruises trying to cut this trail and learned a lot from it,” Powers said. “I hope that it makes it a little bit easier for the next group to build, even if it doesn’t quite look like this.”
North Carolina’s Reentry 2030 Housing Goals:
- Implement an online housing resource guide with housing resources available for every county in the state.
- Reduce the number of formerly incarcerated people experiencing homelessness by 10 percent every year.
- Increase the number of units for people exiting without a housing plan by 1,800 units available each year by 2030 by creating a continuum of housing options, including transitional housing and permanent housing for reentrants.
- Provide 100 percent of self-identified incarcerated veterans within state facilities with services to gain housing upon release by 2030.
Check out the Department of Adult Correction’s Reentry 2030 online dashboard to track progress made on the state’s goals.
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