Resources

Welcome to the Comprehensive Opioid, Stimulant, and Substance Use Program (COSSUP) podcast series featuring conversations with guests about medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in rural jails. This series offers listeners an opportunity to learn from individuals who are involved in providing MAT and recovery support within rural jails. Each of the five podcasts offers a unique perspective based on the role of the guest: a jail medical staff administrator, a peer specialist, a community-based medical provider, an MAT program coordinator, and a jail administrator. They share their lessons learned and experience addressing challenges commonly faced by jails and their partners when implementing MAT.

The Albany County Correctional and Rehabilitative Services Center (ACCRSC) was one of the first correctional facilities in upstate New York to offer all three U.S. Food and Drug Administration-approved medications for treating opioid use disorder. An outside provider administers, in a typical year, methadone, buprenorphine, or naltrexone to 300 individuals who are in custody at ACCRSC.

All individuals who have or are at risk for opioid use disorder, regardless of custody status, are offered medication-assisted treatment (MAT) services. The daily population of the jail averages 383 individuals in pretrial status and 48 individuals who are sentenced. Length of stay for the former is just shy of 40 days; for the latter, 11 days. ACCRSC primarily serves suburban and rural areas.

In this podcast, Jill Harrington, Health Services Administrator at ACCRSC, shares what makes the program successful, the impact of legislation passed in New York State in 2021, the role of partnerships, and the importance of credentialed alcoholism and substance use counselors.

For more information on ACCRSC’s program, go to MAT: Making a Difference in Upstate New York in Catching Up with COSSUP.

Welcome to the Comprehensive Opioid, Stimulant, and Substance Use Program (COSSUP) podcast series featuring conversations with guests about medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in rural jails. This series offers listeners an opportunity to learn from individuals who are involved in providing MAT and recovery support within rural jails. Each of the five podcasts offers a unique perspective based on the role of the guest: a jail medical staff administrator, a peer specialist, a community-based medical provider, an MAT program coordinator, and a jail administrator. They share their lessons learned and experience addressing challenges commonly faced by jails and their partners when implementing MAT.

West Tennessee Healthcare’s Pathways Behavioral Health Services (Pathways) provides mental health and substance use disorder services to residents of approximately 60 counties in Tennessee, a state that is predominantly rural. Services are delivered in seven offices and three peer support centers, as well as via telehealth.

For nearly 5 years, services have included medication-assisted treatment (MAT) for individuals while in jail and upon reentry to the community. In 2022, Pathways became certified as an office-based opioid treatment setting. Pathways administers naltrexone and buprenorphine to approximately 200 individuals every month.

In this podcast, Courtney Collier, Telehealth Coordinator and Peer Specialist for Pathways, discusses his experience working with individuals receiving MAT while in jail custody or upon transition to the community. He shares his insights on overcoming stigma, building community partnerships, using telehealth, and tapping the “power of the peer.”

Welcome to the Comprehensive Opioid, Stimulant, and Substance Use Program (COSSUP) podcast series featuring conversations with guests about medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in rural jails. This series offers listeners an opportunity to learn from individuals who are involved in providing MAT and recovery support within rural jails. Each of the five podcasts offers a unique perspective based on the role of the guest: a jail medical staff administrator, a peer specialist, a community-based medical provider, an MAT program coordinator, and a jail administrator. They share their lessons learned and experience addressing challenges commonly faced by jails and their partners when implementing MAT.

The Community Health Center of Franklin County (CHCFC), located in Greenfield, Massachusetts, serves the most rural area of the commonwealth. CHCFC works directly with the Franklin County House of Correction to provide medication-assisted treatment, cofunding a community health worker who helps with release planning and transitions.

The jail began offering injectable naltrexone in 2015. Within 4 years, it was also offering buprenorphine and methadone, thereby providing all three medications approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for treating opioid use disorder. Notably, the Franklin County House of Corrections is one of the first jails in the nation with an accredited and certified opioid treatment program.

In this podcast, Rachel Katz, Director of CHCFC’s Office-based Addiction Treatment Program, discusses dismantling both internal and external stigma through education, building community buy-in of medications for opioid use disorder, and collaboratively building a safety net for individuals with substance use disorders who are transitioning from incarceration to the community. She advocates for a shift in the medical paradigm to reduce discriminatory practices and improve accessibility to effective treatment.

Welcome to the Comprehensive Opioid, Stimulant, and Substance Use Program (COSSUP) podcast series featuring conversations with guests about medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in rural jails. This series offers listeners an opportunity to learn from individuals who are involved in providing MAT and recovery support within rural jails. Each of the five podcasts offers a unique perspective based on the role of the guest: a jail medical staff administrator, a peer specialist, a community-based medical provider, an MAT program coordinator, and a jail administrator. They share their lessons learned and experience addressing challenges commonly faced by jails and their partners when implementing MAT.

Increasingly, correctional facilities across the country are providing medication-assisted treatment (MAT) to individuals in custody. Successful implementation of MAT programming in rural areas, such as Alaska and Montana, provides valuable lessons on overcoming challenges posed by rural settings.

In this podcast, Michael White, former Director of Community Programs at Community Medical Services, discusses his experience working with rural communities. He describes the collective impact model for building collaboration, which involves honoring and validating the beliefs of jail staff and community members as the first step. He explains how to scale up to MAT provision, why synergy among leadership is important, and what to expect from community providers.

Welcome to the Comprehensive Opioid, Stimulant, and Substance Use Program (COSSUP) podcast series featuring conversations with guests about medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in rural jails. This series offers listeners an opportunity to learn from individuals who are involved in providing MAT and recovery support within rural jails. Each of the five podcasts offers a unique perspective based on the role of the guest: a jail medical staff administrator, a peer specialist, a community-based medical provider, an MAT program coordinator, and a jail administrator. They share their lessons learned and experience addressing challenges commonly faced by jails and their partners when implementing MAT.

In 2019, St. Louis County, Minnesota, was one of 14 jurisdictions in the country selected to participate in the Building Bridges Between Jails and Community-based Treatment initiative, cofunded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance and Arnold Ventures, to promote implementation of medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in jails and enhance collaboration between jails and community-based treatment providers.

The St. Louis County Jail, in Duluth, is a 197-bed facility with an average daily population of 177 men and women, most of whom are being held as high-risk and pretrial. It serves the largest county, by both population and land mass, in Minnesota.

In this podcast, Jessica Pete, Jail Administrator of the St. Louis County Jail, discusses eliminating community and staff bias against MAT; gives advice on the “nuts and bolts” of program implementation, including cross-training medical and security staff; and shares how COVID-19 helped the jail move forward.

The RROE demonstration sites will work with partners within the target communities to facilitate data sharing and integration, enhance prevention and education programs, and expand therapeutic services to individuals with opioid use disorder in their communities.

Rural communities face unique challenges that impact their ability to deliver fair and equitable justice. Despite these challenges, rural communities rely on their many strengths to address the needs of their residents. In 2021, the National Center for State Courts, in partnership with Rulo Strategies, launched the Rural Justice Collaborative (RJC).

The dramatic increase in opioid overdose deaths across the nation, particularly in rural areas, highlights the need for rapid expansion of access to medication treatment for opioid use disorder (MOUD). The Greater Southern California Node (GSCN) of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) Clinical Trials Network (CTN), UCLA Integrated Substance Abuse Programs, and Pacific Southwest Addiction Technology Transfer Center (PSATTC), HHS Region 9, presents a four-part series featuring rural clinicians and clinical researchers who will share practical knowledge and skills for improving care for patients with OUD in rural settings. This is the first session of the four-part series.

“This is a guide for elected officials seeking to enhance existing or develop new pretrial justice practices in rural areas. By identifying the characteristics, strengths and challenges in rural jurisdictions and combining these factors with the lessons and experiences of urban, suburban and rural pretrial justice programs, national standards and best practices, this guide offers a set of recommendations to enhance local policies and practices within the context of rural settings” (p. 3).

This guide is an output of ONDCP’s Rural Opioid Federal Interagency Working Group, co-chaired by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) has tools to help rural America respond to the opioid epidemic, including:

• Resources for prevention, treatment and recovery
• Programs to build upstream resilience and prosperity for the future

In August 2017, the Conference of CHief Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators formed the National Judicial Opioid Task Force (NJOTF) to examine current efforts and find solutions to address the opioid epidemic. The NJOTF is actively engaged in the creation of products to assist courts in addressing the opioid crisis.

To better understand the national opioid crisis and inform effective conversations and interventions, NORC at the University of Chicago and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s USDA Rural Development have created this tool to allow users to map overdose hotspots and overlay them with data that provide additional context to opioid addiction and death including the strength and diversity of local economies, ethnicity, educational attainment, and disability status of residents.

This report by the National Association of Counties and the Appalachian Regional Commission describes the impact of the opioid epidemic on Appalachian counties and offers recommendations for local action. These recommendations are discussed in five sections, each of which features key action steps and one or more case studies highlighting an Appalachian county: (1) leadership, (2) prevention, (3) recovery, (4) rehabilitation for justice-involved individuals, and (5) economic development. The recommendations and case studies contained in the report are designed to aid Appalachian county leaders in their efforts to formulate effective, efficient, and sustainable responses to the opioid epidemic.

This report is one of a series that the Vera Institute of Justice (Vera) is releasing with the Safety and Justice Challenge—the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s initiative to reduce overincarceration. This report explores one of the Incarceration Trends project’s most startling revelations, the dramatic shift in the geography of incarceration to rural counties.

A joint report from National Association of Counties (NACo) and the National League of Cities (NLC) examines how cities and counties can strengthen collaboration with each other and state, federal, private-sector and nonprofit partners to tackle the opioid crisis. Several of the recommendations are accompanied by existing local practices from cities and counties. The report also includes recommendations for state and federal officials, who are pivotal partners in local efforts to combat opioid misuse, diversion, overdose, and death.

This publication by the National Rural Health Association provides an overview of the challenges faced by rural system of care and outlines the strategies and policy recommendations to curb the opioid crisis.

The purpose of the guide is to arm rural leaders with information they can put into immediate action to create change. It provides background information, recommended action steps, and promising practices to help manage the impact of substance use disorder on local communities and help persons with the disease of addiction. The topics are based on lessons learned from Department of Agriculture rural roundtable discussions held in over a dozen states, as well as the experiences of several rural stakeholder partners.

This supplement offers a listing of promising practices that a community can replicate or use to inspire its own action to find a solution to substance use disorder.

It offers tools to empower rural community leaders to assess the causes and impact of substance use disorder and find federal programs to help them build strong healthy drug-free rural communities.

This document identifies the types of equipment, facilities, and support the United States Department of Agriculture funds that can help rural communities address the opioid epidemic.

On December 13–14, 2018, the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) partnered to convene judicial and law enforcement leaders from select rural communities to discuss special challenges associated with tackling the opioid epidemic, to share information on programs and innovations, and to promote discussion and peer learning. BJA and USDA are pleased to release this video of interviews from that event.

This self-assessment from the National Reentry Resource Center helps programs gauge their capacity to provide integrated reentry and employment interventions, including work readiness, to people with varying risks and needs. The tool helps reentry practitioners identify opportunities to build the capacity of their programming and services, which, in turn, can better prepare participants for employment and decrease their likelihood of returning to incarceration.

This brief is one in a series highlighting projects that are part of the Rural Responses to the Opioid Epidemic project. Learn more about Rural Responses to the Opioid Epidemic at https://rural.cossapresources.org/.

This brief is one in a series highlighting projects that are part of the Rural Responses to the Opioid Epidemic project. Learn more about Rural Responses to the Opioid Epidemic at https://rural.cossapresources.org/.

This brief is one in a series highlighting projects that are part of the Rural Responses to the Opioid Epidemic project. Learn more about Rural Responses to the Opioid Epidemic at https://rural.cossapresources.org/.

This brief is one in a series highlighting projects that are part of the Rural Responses to the Opioid Epidemic project. Learn more about Rural Responses to the Opioid Epidemic at https://rural.cossapresources.org/.

This brief is one in a series highlighting projects that are part of the Rural Responses to the Opioid Epidemic project. Learn more about Rural Responses to the Opioid Epidemic at https://rural.cossapresources.org/ .

Through these efforts, the teams make contact with individuals and families who have experienced overdose to offer support and connections to services and treatment.

This brief is one in a series highlighting projects that are part of the Rural Responses to the Opioid Epidemic project. Learn more about Rural Responses to the Opioid Epidemic at https://rural.cossapresources.org/.

This brief is one in a series highlighting projects that are part of the Rural Responses to the Opioid Epidemic project. Learn more about Rural Responses to the Opioid Epidemic at https://rural.cossapresources.org/.

This brief is one in a series highlighting projects that are part of the Rural Responses to the Opioid Epidemic project. Learn more about Rural Responses to the Opioid Epidemic at https://rural.cossapresources.org/.

This document, developed by the Center for Court Innovation, provides an overview of jurisdictions implementing pilot teleservice projects in their problem-solving courts. This report provides a checklist designed to assist practitioners in planning an effective teleservices project. Some of the issues addressed are how teleservices support current drug court operations; how teleservices can fill gaps in treatment; the technology readily available and the technology needed; which stakeholders should be included in planning for court teleservices; funding sources needed; confidentiality requirements in teleservices; needed policies and procedures; and the training needed for court staff and service providers.