For Ex-Prisoners, a Haven Away From the Streets

Filling gaps in prisoner re-entry and transitional housing is the goal of a 14-month-old Fairbanks organization. Southside Reentry Center offers 10 to 15 beds, depending on the season, for people exiting the correctional system, and helps address issues like alcoholism.

Chesterfield County, Virginia implemented a multi-faceted response to the opioid crisis, including a jail-based recovery program, Helping Addicts Recover Progressively (HARP), that brings people in recovery to the local jail to talk about addiction and treatment resources. Combined with other efforts, overdose deaths have dropped by half in a single year, and around 4,000 people have participated in HARP.

Community health workers with North Carolina Formerly Incarcerated Transition Program (NC FIT) counsel people recently released from jails and prisons to help them get the care they need for mental and physical health problems. The program closes some but not all of the gaps left by the state's inadequate Medicaid coverage and prison health services. Banking on the trust that comes with shared experiences, the formerly incarcerated health workers can connect people with medication-assisted treatment for substance use, covid-related treatments, and mental health care, all common ailments post-incarceration.

An array of services in Pima County, Arizona, greets hundreds of people getting released early from jail or helps keep them out of jail in the first place. By providing drug treatment, housing, job assistance, and other help that people need instead of incarceration, the county's Criminal Justice Reform Unit and Jail Population Review Committee saved the county $2 million in jail costs over just part of 2020. Drug use also declined and officials hope to see longer-range benefits in lower recidivism.

The Fulton Community Supervision Center in Missouri provides trauma-informed, gender-specific care and services to women who face the risk of recidivism. Participants live at the center, where they receive services like cognitive behavioral therapy and classes that teach coping mechanisms and personal and professional development. Core to much of the programming is helping women find their self worth.

The Transitions Clinic Network is a program that helps to connect people who were arrested on drug charges with health-care professionals and a social support system once they are released. Originally piloted in San Francisco, this program now has over 30 affiliates throughout the country.

L.A. Superior Court Judge Craig Mitchell started the Skid Row Running Club, which leads runs every morning with formerly incarcerated addicts. Many of the participants have led successful lives after running, giving credence to the evidence of a linkage between aerobic exercise and a reparation of the parts of the brain that have been damaged by drug and alcohol abuse.

In rural North Dakota where clinical treatment centers are hard to find, a program called Free Through Recovery "seeks to drive down North Dakota’s prison rates by creating networks of sobriety and support around people on probation and parole." Although local law enforcement claims the program is not an alternative to incarceration, in the short time it has been in operation, it has served over 550 people with many participants securing both housing and work opportunities.

The Ohio Reformatory for Women is a prison that offers inmates a chance to enroll in Tapestry, an inpatient drug treatment program that tries to delve into the deeper causes women turn to drugs. It also believes in connecting women who are addicts with one another because “on the outside there’s not enough support.” The 18 month program is “about healing mind, body and spirit.”

For Redina, and others suffering from addiction, it is hard to break the cycle. 'Women Working for a Change' is a program that tries to change addicts' thinking in order to prevent a relapse.