Vonya Quarles, an attorney and the executive director of Starting Over, Inc., says people leaving prison are handed $200 and sent on their way, whether they served 50 days or 50 years.
“They come home with $200 gate money; it doesn’t matter if you spent 50 years working in there or 50 days,” she said.
She knows the arithmetic because she lived it. After her own release she worked at an oil refinery for 20 years. She earned a bachelor’s degree and then a law degree, and was licensed to practise law in 2013. In 2009 she co-founded Starting Over, Inc., which provides transitional housing, employment development, and basic needs including food, clothing and school supplies.
The turn she points to came earlier, in a leadership programme for formerly incarcerated women that she went through about 15 years ago. “I never knew that people cared outside of those of us who have been impacted by the carceral system,” she said. “It was a combination of everything: being in the room with those other women that I had so much in common with.”
She is direct about what that did and did not do. “I think the timing was critical and that experience actually helped define what I would later do with a law degree,” she said.
In 2025, she and colleagues from Starting Over founded a community land trust named for Ruchell Magee, who came home after roughly 60 years inside and died three months later, in his eighties. “We picked up Ruchell Magee from prison,” she said.
Her work now focuses on the collateral consequences of a conviction: family reunification, housing and employment. She is a founding member of the Riverside All of Us or NONE chapter.
She does not treat her own story as the product. “It’s not just about telling your story as formerly incarcerated people,” she said.
