Treating addiction in jail
Over the years, the Allegheny County Jail has taken plenty of criticism and rightly so. The latest controversy concerns compliance with a county referendum prohibiting the use of solitary confinement.
But quietly and without fanfare, the jail has undertaken progressive initiatives that, while rarely making news, affect the entire community. At least 8,000 people a year cycle in and out of the local jail.
Most notably, the jail’s panoply of reentry programs help prisoners successfully transition to the community by assisting them with employment and housing, as well as treating mental illness and drug and alcohol addiction.
More than half of the 1,500 people in the local jail struggle with drug or alcohol abuse. If those problems aren’t treated, they will help build a costly and destructive revolving door to the Allegheny County Jail. Recidivism rates are dropping but still are at about40 percent over 24 months.
So the announcement this week by Warden Orlando Harper that the jail has added a medication-assisted treatment program to treat opioid addiction is welcome news. Opioid addiction typically starts with prescription painkillers, such as Vicodin and Oxycodone, then progresses to stronger street drugs like heroin and fentanyl.
Opioid addiction is tough to beat; relapse rates with traditional abstinence programs exceed 90 percent. Medication-assisted treatment, however, using drugs like Suboxone, has dramatically lowered relapse rates by easing the craving for opioids and agony of withdrawal. More than 70 Allegheny County prisoners receive medication-assisted treatment.
Using a one-year grant of $150,000 from the Pennsylvania Office of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, Allegheny County now provides Sublocade to up to 30 prisoners a month. Unlike Suboxone, which is taken orally, Sublocade is injected. Monthly injections of Sublocade greatly reduce opioid cravings but are usually unaffordable. Initial doses cost up to $6,000; subsequent maintenance doses run up to $2,000 each.
Drug treatment programs save lives and save the community the costs of ongoing incarceration, as well as the costs of theft and other crimes committed by addicted people to get money to buy drugs.
Prisoner re-entry programs are standard fare at state prisons, where average length-of-stays are typically four years. But such programs are far less common and comprehensive at county jails, where prisoners, on average, stay for about a month.
In Allegheny County, re-entry programs have helped the jail drop recidivism rates by 30 percent from 2018 to 2020.
A new medication-assisted treatment program at the jail might not lead local news broadcasts. But it’s another invaluable effort to keep people leavingt he jail from coming back.