At the Somerset County jail in rural Maine, prisoners addicted to opioids received a daily pill to keep cravings in check. As soon as they were released, their access to the medicine ended. As their cravings surged, they were re-entering society at high risk for withdrawal, relapse and overdose, dangers that released prisoners confront nationwide. “A lot of these inmates are our neighbors and it’s in our best interest to assimilate them back into the community, but some would end up dying,” said Somerset County Sheriff, Dale Lancaster. “For me, that’s not acceptable.” Hoping to change those grim outcomes, Lancaster tried providing a different — and far less common — form of the medication, buprenorphine: an extended-release shot that subdues urges for about 28 days, reports the New York Times.
According to the journal Health and Justice about his jail’s pilot project, the switch had a remarkable effect. The long-acting injection afforded newly released prisoners a crucial buffer period after they were discharged, with more time to set up continuing addiction treatment and stabilize their lives. The jail’s experience is “an important step in showing where we as a society can go to cut back on people dying from this disease,” said Dr. Josiah Rich, a national expert in addiction and incarceration at Brown University. Of the more than 1.2 million U.S. prisoners, up to 65 percent of prisoners have substance use disorders. Many treatment specialists argue that county jails and state and federal prisons could be poised to interrupt that cycle of addiction, which often includes crimes of theft, violence and drug sales, with repeat episodes of incarceration. Addiction treatment for prisoners is relatively scarce and the expensive, extended-After being released, the Somerset County prisoners who got the shot were three times as likely to continue treatment as those at another rural Maine jail who received the daily pills. Between September 2022 and September 2023, three prisoners from the jail where the pills were dispensed died from overdoses within three months of release; a fourth died by suicide. None of the former Somerset prisoners who had received the injections died.