Jailhouse rehab
Expansion of re-entry programs with a focus on rehabilitation for addiction changes lives.
From the bench of Harris County’s 228th Criminal Court, Judge Marc Carter looked down at the 47-year-old man wearing an orange jumpsuit at a hearing in October 2016 and said, “You are who you are. Your history is not going to change.” Then, he added an important caveat: “I do believe in redemption,” as reported by Chronicle reporter Brooke A. Lewis.
After listening to testimony on the inmate’s rehabilitation, Carter ended up granting Joseph Dowell, who spent more than 20 years in and out of incarceration, five years’ probation with no prison time.
The son of drug addicts, Dowell, who grew up in Fifth Ward, used drugs, then started selling them to provide for his wife and three sons. But his most recent incarceration at Harris County Jail changed the trajectory of his life of crime. Following graduation from an effective re-entry program with a focus on rehabilitation for addiction, Dowell remains off drugs and gainfully employed six months after the hearing in Carter’s court.
Dowell’s success story has been replicated by others. Only 20 percent of inmates who go through the county’s reentry program end up incarcerated again; the recidivism rate for inmates held at the Harris County Jail, meanwhile, is 80 percent. The jail’s reentry programs also serve veterans, inmates with a history of prostitution, and pregnant and postpartum inmates. A common thread, as with Dowell: Addiction.
Despite their effectiveness, existing re-entry programs are able to handle just a fraction of the inmates, only about 2,000 inmates per year, while the system incarcerates roughly 9,000 people per day. Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, Harris County Commissioners and Sheriff Ed Gonzalez should unite to expand these re-entry programs and remake Harris County Jail, long-considered a dank, institutional holding tank, into a place where more inmates are given the opportunity to change their lives.
Jail offers unique opportunities for rehabilitation. Inmates locked up in the jail are clean and off any addictive substance that has been driving their poor choices. Cut off from most contact with the outside world, they have an opportunity to gain a panoramic view of “the wreckage of their lives,” as argued by Sam Quinones, author of an op-ed, “A New Kind of Jail for The Opiate Age,” published recently in the New York Times.
Jails offer new capacity for rehabilitation, at a cheaper cost than expanding rehabilitation centers. Nearly 300 people were on a waiting list for residential treatment programs like those run by the county at Atascosita as of February. Eighty percent of those are waiting in jail, according to county statistics (“County eyes probation overhaul” March 1, Page A3).
More than 27 million people in the United States reported current use of illicit drugs or misuse of prescription drugs in 2015, yet the odds are 1 in 10 of an addict ever getting the help that he needs, according to a 2016 surgeon general’s report. Many factors contribute to this “treatment gap,” including the inability to access or afford care.
Remaking jails into a place of recovery is a smarter use of public money than the status quo. Currently, thousands of people each year are cycling in and out of jail at taxpayer expense while they fail to regain control over their lives.
Jails should be more than dumping grounds. “They can offer hope,” Jennifer Herring, the social worker who directs the re-entry programs, told us. It’s time to stop locking up inmates and throwing away the key. Our jails need to help offenders forge their own keys to better lives.