Jennifer McCord has $994 a month in Social Security disability payments, nearly $700 of which goes to rent. After other bills, she typically has $30 to $50 left for groceries. Last August, she stood in a Food Lion parking lot in Asheboro asking strangers to buy her food. A pastor agreed and spent about $100.
McCord would qualify for SNAP by income — the federal food assistance program serving more than 1.2 million low-income North Carolinians. But a 2009 drug trafficking conviction has permanently disqualified her. “They take my food for the rest of my life because of a choice I made when I was 23,” said McCord, now 42. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in February and must improve her nutrition before chemotherapy can begin.
Her situation flows from a 1996 welfare reform provision. The Sentencing Project documented that the amendment received just two minutes of Senate debate before passing by voice vote. Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, its sponsor, argued that people “violating the Nation’s drug laws” should not receive welfare benefits — a ban applied to no other category of felony.
Just over half of states and the District of Columbia have since opted out entirely. North Carolina has not. Lower-level drug felonies carry a six-month minimum ban with conditions to regain eligibility; those with Class A through G felony drug convictions face a lifetime ban. “From my assessment of the national landscape — outside of South Carolina — we have one of the harshest felony SNAP ban laws in our nation,” said Laura Webb, director of the Fair Chance Criminal Justice Project at the NC Justice Center.
About 16 percent of North Carolina’s state prison population — more than 33,000 people — are incarcerated for drug crimes. In 2025 alone, 4,924 people were released after serving time for drug offenses. Only 37 percent of people exiting NC prisons in 2024 found employment within a year, at an average wage of $15,560.
Research links the ban to worse reentry outcomes. The pattern played out in Nebraska last year, where the legislature voted to end its own lifetime ban, only for Republican Governor Jim Pillen to veto it; lawmakers fell just short of an override. Pillen argued in his veto letter that people who distribute illegal drugs “should not be entitled to taxpayer-funded benefits.” Gina Plata-Nino, SNAP deputy director of the Food Research and Action Center, told NPR that Nebraska has seen recidivism increase in part because of the food ban.
North Carolina saw a similar effort stall. The Public Safety Through Food Access Act — introduced in both chambers in 2025 with bipartisan support — never advanced out of committee, despite polling commissioned by the NC Chamber finding roughly 80 percent of respondents backed food access regardless of conviction. Evan Ashkin, a UNC family medicine physician who treats formerly incarcerated patients, said the exclusion “does not serve a public safety function. It’s counterproductive and not a crime deterrent.”
Advocates are also pressing a federal fix. The Drug Policy Alliance, a drug reform advocacy organization, is backing the RESTORE Act — a bipartisan bill that would repeal the lifetime ban nationwide. Congress has not acted on it.
McCord says she doesn’t eat some days. Her co-defendant from the 2009 case lives in Virginia and receives SNAP. “It may be getting to a point soon that I may just have to try to find somewhere to live in Virginia and move,” she said, “because at least I can access food there.”