A 2018 study from the Utah Foundation found that 14 of Utah’s 26 jails had substance abuse programs in place. The Weber County jail is one of them — it offers substance abuse treatment and a range of other in-house services, including mental health counseling, vocational rehabilitation, Alcoholics Anonymous programming and parenting classes.
One of the challenges of offering such programming within county jails, however, is that people don’t tend to stay there very long. This makes establishing support networks in the outside community especially important, according to Jesse Jannetta, a senior policy fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., who studies jail reentry and recidivism.
“If you’ve got good programming but it takes several months to finish it, that’s not going to be helpful for people who are going to be in jail for much less time than that,” Jannetta said. “Reentry support work has to happen predominantly on the community side, because there may not be enough time to work with people in jail before they get out.”
Spending even just several days in jail can uproot a person’s life, Jannetta pointed out. In that time, somebody can lose a job, lose their housing, lose support from their family.
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