Rhode Island Prisons Push To Get Inmates The Best Treatment For Opioid Addiction — NPR
A look inside Rhode Island’s John J. Moran Medium Security Prison. Photo credit: Andrew Burton/Getty Images
National Public Radio recently spoke with men at a medium security prison in Cranston to discuss their experience with addiction as part of an All Things Considered segment. Congress is currently reviewing a criminal justice reform bill that would require correctional facilities across the nation to assess the possibility of implementing MAT programs that can help curb the opioid epidemic, which has led to over 70,000 overdoses in 2017 alone.
CODAC Behavioral Healthcare has lended its support to the recovery community in numerous ways. One way CODAC is helping people in recovery and addressing the crisis is by providing incarcerated individuals with access to medication and therapy before and after being released from prison.
The Rhode Island Department of Corrections’ MAT program has been considered a positive step towards addressing the opioid crisis, and other states have begun to take notice. Health officials and esteemed researchers such as Josiah Rich of Brown University have cited statistics that highlight the program’s impact as a reason to continue paying for the annual expenditure in Rhode Island.
“It’s just ludicrous that we have a whole population of people who are by and large incarcerated because of their disease, and we have an effective medication treatment for the disease and we don’t give it to them,” Dr. Rich told NPR.
The program in the state’s correctional facilities are run by CODAC, which is the oldest, non-profit outpatient provider for the treatment of Opioid Use Disorder. Leslie Barber of CODAC discussed some of the compromises that were made to ensure everyone who enters a correctional facility with an addiction in Rhode Island receives the care they need.
Read the full story or listen to the segment here: https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2018/11/19/668340844/rhode-island-prisons-push-to-get-inmates-the-best-treatment-for-opioid-addiction
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