Transcript:

Welcome to The Long Way Home, a five-part limited series that journeys into the heart of substance use disorders and recovery. With a focus on women, people in recovery, vulnerable communities, and those who have traveled the long way home, we explore how addiction uniquely impacts pregnant people, mothers, adolescents, and young adults. 

Through conversations with leading experts, lawmakers, and people in recovery, we examine the intersection of addiction, the criminal legal system, systemic neglect, and the enduring effects of colonization. We center the right to recovery, recognizing it as a complex, lifelong process that deserves time, attention, and resources.

This series is a space for truth telling, learning, and imagining a more just and supportive path home.

In this fourth episode of The Long Way Home, we examine the collateral consequences of drug use and incarceration, with Regina LaBelle and Suzula Bidon.

00:00:00 Michele Goodwin:

Thank you very much, Suzula and Regina, for joining me in this special episode as part of our new series, a very important series, The Long Way Home, and a Tagged For Life, Collateral Consequences of Drug Use and Incarceration in this episode with you, Suzula, and Regina LaBelle. I’d like to start off with you, Regina. Regina, if you can discuss the intersection of criminalization, drug use, and addiction? What role does the criminalization of drug use play in the experience of drug use and addiction?

00:00:50 Regina LaBelle:

Thanks so much for having us on this podcast to discuss this issue. So, you know, they’re inextricably linked, because, you know, drugs are illegal in the United States, you know, underage alcohol use. Cannabis is legal in over half the states now, but you know, for decades, we have had an approach that…I was thinking about this this morning. People may…you know, over 60% of people who are in jails have a substance use disorder and / or a mental health condition.

So, they come into the jail or prison with a lot of preconditions, and they leave with even more challenges to improving health outcomes as well as, you know, their social status. So, you know, they are inextricably linked because of the nation’s traditional approach that we’ve had, where we’ve thought that we could punish substance use disorder out of people, and fortunately, we are learning more about that. We’re trying to…making efforts to divert people away who have substance use disorder away from jails and prisons, and then providing them with treatment, but it’s still…we fall really short, and there are still too many collateral consequences that people face when they leave a jail or prison with a drug conviction.

00:02:29 Michele Goodwin:

If I could follow up on that, Regina, would you say, as well, that this history reminds me of something that Victoria Nourse said years ago. That this is a country, the United States, that seeks to solve important problems through criminalization, rather than other kinds of means. It seems to me that there’s also a lens through this that is also racialized and an overlooked lens that involves women, too. Could you just touch on that a little bit?

00:03:01 Regina LaBelle:

Sure. So, certainly, you know, a lot of people who…if you’re a family member who’s been affected by substance use, if you’re in a community that has, perhaps, you know…used to be open-air drug markets, you want solutions to take the problem away…that take the problem away, and if we look at substance use as a moral issue, which we have for a really long time, substance use disorder, that, then we had a quick and easy solution, which is to lock them up, and also, you know, the racialization is clearly present. I’ve seen, over time, the way that…you know, the way the opioid epidemic, which struck primarily white communities in the United States initially, how different the approach was than when we had the crack cocaine epidemic, which was, primarily, in Black urban areas around the country.

The differences are stark. We certainly have learned a lot more about, you know, the science of addiction since then, but you can’t overlook the racial overtones that have occurred over time, and you know, Washington, DC, though, in a contrary way, if you split Washington, DC down the middle, the overdose death rates in the eastern part of the city, east of the Anacostia River, are astronomical numbers, versus the western part of the city, which is the white part of the city, and that’s due to fentanyl, which is traditionally linked to heroin use. So, we can’t overlook the racial elements and also, that search for quick and easy answers to really complex issues.

00:04:57 Michele Goodwin:

Thank you so much for that, and it strikes me that, you know, the US, with this carceral approach, it incarcerates more woman than any other country in the world, more than Russia, China, Thailand, Mexico combined, and it’s this overlooked aspect, and I want to turn to Suzula. Thank you so much for being with us, and in particular, you have a really important perspective to share, and you’ve been sharing it with others, and I appreciate your being here, and in this conversation that we’re going to have, it’s about your own personal experiences and the consequences that have come with the criminalization of drug use. Can you share your story and how criminalization impacted your life in recovery?

00:05:52 Suzula Bidon:

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me, Michele. It’s an honor to be on this podcast. So, how does the criminal legal system and incarceration affect me? In 2005, I was addicted to methamphetamine, and I made the mistake of sending small amounts to a friend across state lines through the mail at his request. After about three months of doing that intermittently, there was a concealed indictment, and I was indicted on one federal felony count of conspiracy to possess, intent to distribute methamphetamine, which comes with a 10-year mandatory minimum.

So, just back to your question about women, I think this is so incredibly important, because by incarcerating women, you are taking them out of the home, and if you know anything…and I’m sure you do, and if your listeners know anything about adverse childhood experiences, you know, having a parent removed from the home creates an…I don’t know how many fold, but increases a child’s likelihood or susceptibility to bad health, including susceptibility to substance use disorder. So, I guess I’m not sure…is there something specific that you’d like to know? I did 30 months.

I spent a year in federal prison camp. Basically, Orange Is the New Black, and then I got out and relapsed, and was sent back for 18 months for relapsing, and that means just having drugs in my system based on a drug test that I had to take because I was on supervised release, and that’s when I had my second epiphany. I had my recovery epiphany in jail when they took me into custody to decide if I was going to be thrown back in prison, because I saw the same people at the jail, and I was like, oh my gosh, this is a pattern. This is my life. Doesn’t matter…nothing matters. I have to do something about this, and then I went to treatment.

I’ve been in recovery since April 23 of ’08. Went for my postponed revocation hearing. Different judge with a jurisdiction, having moved to Minnesota, and he is the one who said that I had not learned my lesson and I needed 18 months in the maximum-security facility for women, and that’s when, like I said, I had my second epiphany where…this isn’t for the record, but in my head, I thought, you know what? No. You do not get to take away 18 months of my life because I have what you have decided is an illegal disease. So, I did my 18 months, 15 with good time, and then got out and became a lawyer. Went to law school and became a lawyer.

00:08:58 Michele Goodwin:

Suzula, thank you so much for sharing that, and I know that you’ve been interviewed, and you’ve written about this. You’ve been quoted with saying, faced with such severe consequences, anyone without the disease of addiction would’ve been able to stop using drugs, and that you could, and you said that you served a year in prison, got out, and relapsed. You’ve written about this. You’ve talked about this. You’ve talked about begging for help, and then, thanks to a public defender, you were allowed to go to treatment, and that was more than nine years ago, and you’ve been in recovery ever since.

Thank you so much for sharing, because so many people don’t hear the story of women and what women go through, and you’ve mentioned what it means when women are taken away from our society, from our communities, from our neighborhoods, and treated as pariahs. You know, men get this sense of forgiveness, even from presidential platforms. What happens with men who are incarcerated is given voice. Famously, when President Obama began turning attention to carcerality, Eric Holder gave a speech before the American Bar Association, mentioning men and disparate sentencing.

He didn’t mention women, and I think he’s a great person and was a great attorney general, but in that speech before the ABA, women were not a part of what was imagined or thought about in terms of a mass incarcerated population behind bars in the United States, and then President Obama gave a talk before the NAACP shortly after that, and again, women were an afterthought. They really weren’t thought of, but we know that some of the same dramatic kind of disparities happen with women, and when you mention what happens with children…

And I ask you to maybe touch on that a little bit more. Kirstin Turney, who’s a sociologist at the University of California, Irvine studies children of parents who are incarcerated, and what her research reveals is that children of incarcerated parents fair worse than children who’ve experienced a parent’s death and fair worse than children who’ve gone through parents’ divorce, and it’s been so significant, than even Sesame Street has now created a Muppet, a puppet, named Alex, and Alex has a parent that is incarcerated, to try to give voice for children who also suffer, and I wonder if you might touch on that just a little bit more?

00:11:44 Suzula Bidon:

Sure. I just know I’ve studied trauma a lot. I teach a yoga class that’s trauma sensitive, and so, when I think about a young child whose mother and their father are ripped from the home, they’re put into, perhaps, the, you know, family regulation system, Child Protective Services, and you know, gone to foster care. I mean, that’s a huge fork in the road for these kids, and you know, especially now, as most facilities, most carceral facilities, they are now making it so that you can’t have touch visits.

You can only have, like, through a video screen, and we know touch is so incredibly important for children and parents, and so, I think the other piece of that…you mentioned how it’s worse than the death of a parent, divorce. It’s because of the shame factor and the stigma factor. You know, to be a child growing up with all this stress and not having wonderful parents in the home and dealing with that, and then also having to explain, yeah, my parents are imprisoned. I mean, it’s just, it’s the best recipe I can think of to create future people that struggle with substance use disorders, health conditions, and incarceration, frankly.

00:13:13 Michele Goodwin:

I have a question for you both, but just one more, Suzula, before I turn back to both of you, and that is a question about the persisting types of social consequences or legal consequences that I think many people may not understand. I’d say that part of my learning is through my own research, but serving on a board that focused on women who experienced incarceration, and understanding and seeing, firsthand, just the ways in which women who are incarcerated are treated, which people don’t pay attention to. What it means if you have breast cancer behind bars, cervical cancer, just the shaming if you even need ice. How salt might be put in the ice or soap detergent because, heaven’s forbid, women be able to get the chance to chew on ice in Arizona, where it’s very, very hot, but it seems that there are consequences that also linger after release, even if you’ve dotted every I, crossed every T, been the best citizen possible, I think that there’s a lack of understanding of what it’s like to then be in society after having experienced time incarcerated. Could you speak to that?

00:14:36 Suzula Bidon:

Sure. So, there’s the niccc.nationalreentryresourcecenter.org, and they have a comprehensive, state-by-state, as well as federal and US territories system of all of the collateral consequences of a conviction. I think…it’s been a while, but the last time I checked, there were more than 144 thousand. You know, everything from you can’t serve as the county treasurer, to you can’t get a job in X, Y, or Z profession. So, it’s just such a huge, huge weight.

And when you think about some of these women who are coming out, who have been locked up for 5, 10, 15 years, they’ve never seen a cell phone. They don’t know how to use the internet, and they have no money, no connections. We need to create such a robust community reentry network for those people, because, otherwise, the likelihood of them going back is so great, in part, because it feels safe because they’ve been institutionalized, and I’m saying this from my own experience. So, yeah, I mean, it’s really…I had to jump through many hoops to get my law _____ 00:15:58, which I now have in three jurisdictions. So, they didn’t make it easy, but I was able to do it.

00:16:05 Regina LaBelle:

You know, I want to add to that.

00:16:07 Michele Goodwin:

Please.

00:16:08 Regina LaBelle:

The baggage that you walk in with, and then you’re handed 15 more pieces of luggage that you have to carry out with you, and they say, you got to carry these for life, and one of them is, as Suzula says, was are these collateral consequences? Which they’re numerous, there are some at the federal level, and many, many at the state level. A woman in Washington State, Tarra Simmons, she was a nurse. She was incarcerated. She had a substance use disorder.

She’s now a state representative in the Washington State Legislature, after serving her incarceration. She also went to Seattle University Law School, graduated, took the bar, and the Washington State Bar Association, of which I’m a member at the time, said, no, you can’t be a lawyer because of your past substance use and your incarceration. So, she appealed, went to the State Supreme Court, and they ruled from the bench that she could, indeed, have her law license, and there was absolutely no reason not to, but those are some of the hoops.

There are more bar associations around the country. Suzula’s been working with several of them to revise their rules, but that’s just one example, and there are many others, and one of the things, if you’re incarcerated, when you leave, if you have a substance use disorder, you may be connected to treatment. That’s happening more often now, but you also, as part of recovery, need employment and housing, and those, particularly employment, are not made easy. It’s not made easy for you to find a job if you have a record, particularly a felony conviction.

So, all of those things are items that, you know, add to the ladder you have to climb in order to sustain your recovery, not return back. There are federal programs. One of them is before the Senate now, Reentry Act. There are also some local organizations that do things, like teach soft skills to people upon reentry, because as Suzula said, they may not know, you know, how to use a cell phone yet. So, those are…you know, there are a lot of courageous people out there doing the work on a day-to-day basis, but there’s a big hill to climb.

00:18:38 Michele Goodwin:

Reentry is difficult. It’s very difficult, and even more so when it’s a society that’s not paying attention to what all of those hurdles represent, and I appreciate the story that you just shared, that both of you just shared, such that even for those who’ve done the work, gone to law school, which is not easy whatsoever, right, taken the bar exam, all of those things and still being denied. So, whether on one end of the scale or the other, many different hurdles to cross. Regina, you’ve written about the criminalization of addiction and that it isn’t working. Prevention and treatment deserve a chance.

And I’m quoting here from this article that you wrote, which is posted at Cato Unbound. A good place to start, you say, is by integrating the addiction treatment system into the healthcare system, since substance use disorders have long been considered moral failings, requiring a criminal justice response. The healthcare system is ill-equipped to respond effectively to any type of substance use disorder. Can you share a bit more about the theory behind this, that criminalizing addiction isn’t working, and that the way in which we need to go is prevention and treatment and that that’s an integration within the healthcare system in order to be successful?

00:20:09 Regina LaBelle:

Sure. So, the prevention piece, as Suzula said, what’s, you know, really remarkable is that, basically, it’s a recipe for developing children into adults who have their own either substance use disorder or other conditions. By not looking at the family as a system, when, you know, if a parent needs treatment, we separate the parent while they, you know, “get better,” and take the children out of the picture, when, really, you need to be thinking about the entire family as a unit, and that’s part of prevention.

And we focus on prevention, often from a perspective as the one-on-one parenting, which is really important, but we also need to focus on the piece of prevention that’s about making sure that people have housing, they have employment, and then the substance use piece integrated into the healthcare system, it wasn’t until the last decade that we actually had that addiction medicine was recognized as a specialty. That, if you wanted treatment, you had to…very successful, AA is very successful. You either went to an AA meeting, or you found a separate type of treatment system, but really, what we need to do is have people who are in the medical community identify someone who might need help and refer them to treatment or refer them for other services that they may be in need of.

So, I think, for years, addiction has been seen as something that we’ll let the criminal justice system take care of it, and clearly, if substance use disorder is a condition, you know, that’s a recognized medical condition, it’s the responsibility of our healthcare community to address that, not just say, you know, we’ll just incarcerate someone or arrest them, and they’ll get better on their own. We know, from neuroscience, that that’s not what happens, and we know, from years of evidence, that, you know, people will do better if they are provided these other employment services, housing services, as well as counseling, that they may need to enter recovery and also to sustain their recovery.

00:22:56 Michele Goodwin:

Well, Regina, to the point in the article that you wrote and what you’ve just said, I quote you with saying, every day, people with opioid use disorder are incarcerated, forced into withdrawal, and denied treatment, medications that would prevent abrupt withdrawal and give them a better chance of entering recovery and avoiding overdose. You know, one of the things that we haven’t talked about, and I’ve got other questions for you before I let you go. I could spend a lot of time with you here. Is just the cost. How much it costs to society by incarcerating individuals, rather than giving them a chance at recovery through medical treatment.

In New Jersey, it costs more to incarcerate someone than to send them to Princeton, and it seems to me that, economically…and this shouldn’t be about numbers. It should be about compassion, about people, about human dignity, and human rights, but it seems to me that this makes no sense on many different levels, including those that are economic. So, I want to turn to my last questions here with you, and I really appreciate the time that both of you have given to me for this episode. Regina, in February of this year, you testified before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health to discuss combatting existing and emerging illicit drug threats.

In that testimony, you talked about those who are working to overcome addiction and rebuild their lives in recovery. That work requires strong support systems and effective public policies. What are some of the approaches, do you think, that could take place that would lead us to a better place? And Suzula, I’d ask you the same, too. I’ll start off with you, Regina, and close out with Suzula on what can take place right now from a federal level, state level, civil society organizations, to move this agenda along and to get us to a better place?

00:25:01 Regina LaBelle:

Well, I mean, one thing that’s happening right now is the House and Senate are considering the Appropriations legislation, and the legislation that…the president’s proposed budget that went to the Hill would have significantly reduced the grant programs we have for people to prevent, treat, and sustain recovery for people with substance use disorder, and we also know the impact that the One Big Beautiful Bill will have on Medicaid, which will cause…I am incredibly concerned about the impact that kicking, you know, millions of people off of Medicaid will have on our overdose death rates, as well as just substance use disorder generally.

So, one thing we can do right now is pay attention to what’s happening on the Hill and make sure that we’re sustaining the funding that’s needed. This is not something…again, AA is effective for alcohol use disorder, and it is free, but it is not sufficient, and we need to support people at the local level who do harm reduction programs. They are underfunded. They provide the type of low-barrier care that people who may never enter a doctor’s office need. So, I could go on and on, but I will leave it at that. There’s a lot more that we need to do to hold, you know, members of Congress accountable, as well as supporting local community groups that are doing the right thing to help their people in need.

00:26:36 Michele Goodwin:

And Suzula, I’ll close out with you. What could be done now to help move along a more just, dignified agenda to help individuals with substance use disorders?

00:26:52 Suzula Bidon:

One of the things that I’ve been really excited about for the last 10 years in the SUD space and in the mental health space is peer support, peer recovery support. So, I think it would be…for instance, there are people who work for recovery community organizations who have contracts with drug courts, and then people who have been trained in providing peer support go in, and it’s voluntary. The people can choose whether or not to work with them. I just think we need to meet people where they are. Just like Regina was saying, you know, get off this 12-Step mandate. The 12 Steps saved my life, and people have different paths to recovery, and shaming them and excluding them because they haven’t chosen the 12 Steps is…does no one any good. So, I’m not knocking the 12 Steps. I just think we really need to start incorporating, you know, harm reduction and a lot more community-based services and peers.

00:28:03 Michele Goodwin:

I want to thank you both for joining me for this episode and for being part of this very important series. This series that focuses on The Long Way Home, Tagged For Life, Collateral Consequences of Drug Use and Incarceration, this particular episode. Thank you so much, Regina. Thank you so much, Suzula. I really appreciate it.

00:28:24 Regina LaBelle:

Thank you.

00:28:28 Suzula Bidon:

Thank you. Thanks for having us.

00:28:29 Regina LaBelle:

Take care.

Guests and listeners, thank you for joining us for our special limited series podcast, The Long Way Home. We want to thank our guests, and to our listeners, we thank you, for tuning in to learn more about addiction and recovery.

For more information about what we discussed today, head to msmagazine.com. This podcast series is available on Apple Podcast, Spotify, iHeartRadio, and wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. We are ad free, and reader supported, so we encourage you to support independent feminist media.

Look for us at msmagazine.com for new content, and special episode updates, and if you want to reach us to recommend guests for our show, or topics that you want to hear about, write to us at ontheissues@msmagazine.com.

We want to thank collaborators for this project, including Professor Regina LaBelle. She is the Director of the Center on Addiction Policy at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown Law. She is also a Professor of Addiction Policy at Georgetown, where she is also the Founder and Director of the Masters of Science in Addiction Policy and Practice Program.

Our producers for this episode are Roxy Szal, Oliver Haug, Allison Whelan, Mariah Lindsay, and our intern is Emerson Panigrahi. We also thank Jennifer Weiss Wolf. The creative vision behind our work includes art and design by Brandi Phipps, editing by Natalie Hadland, music by Chris J. Lee, and we are always grateful to you, our listeners.