Prisons and Jails are Still Not the Place to Treat Drug Addiction

August 22, 2023

On August 9, Noah Weiland wrote encouragingly in the New York Times of a California prison providing opioid-medication buprenorphine for those incarcerated. He concluded that the offering of medication-assisted treatment (MAT) is a “new tactic” to “battle fentanyl” and quoted addiction specialist Dr. Justin Berk declaring such treatment a way to “treat the opioid overdose crisis.”

This message is reminiscent of a six-year old opinion piece also published in the New York Times, “Addicts Need Help. Jails Could Have the Answer” (Sunday Review, June 18, 2017), where Sam Quinones promoted jail treatment as a solution to opioid addiction. In a subsequent letter to the editor, Inimai Chettiar and Grainne Dunne (June 26, 2017) responded that, while it is certainly important that those incarcerated receive treatment, “jail isn’t the place to treat drug addiction.” Rather, they continued, it “institutionalize[s] its placement there” and reinforces “the belief that people battling addiction deserve punishment.”

In a new wave of optimism for incarceration-based treatment, their message remains strikingly important: people incarcerated absolutely deserve effective treatment, which includes MAT, but we need to invest in community-based support rather than criminal justice efforts. Simply put, prisons and jails are still not the place to treat drug addiction.