From The Marshall Project:
In 2018, Congress passed the First Step Act, a wide-ranging prison reform legislation that, among other things, required the federal prison system to expand access to medications for people addicted to opioids. Amid a historic spike in overdoses, both inside prisons and jails and in the country at large, the idea was to save lives: These medications reduce drug use and protect against overdose, and the weeks just after release are a particularly vulnerable time for formerly incarcerated people.
This article was published in partnership with USA Today.The Act came with tens of millions of dollars for implementation. Yet bureaucratic inertia and outdated thinking about addiction treatment means the federal program is still serving only a tiny fraction of those eligible, The Marshall Project has learned.
As of July, the Bureau of Prisons had only 268 people on medications to treat opioid dependence, according to Jeffrey A. Burkett, who helps oversee the rollout of the program as the National Health Services Administrator for the BOP. This is less than 2% of the more than 15,000 people the bureau itself estimated were eligible, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report. Even as the Department of Justice — the parent agency of the BOP — investigates other prisons and jails for not providing these medications, the bureau “lacks key planning elements to ensure this significant expansion is completed in a timely and effective manner,” the Government Accountability Office said. Continue reading >>>
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