When the penal system releases people without a plan, everyone pays 

A conservative Republican former sheriff from Jacksonville and a progressive Democrat from Trenton don’t end up writing op-eds together by accident. We’re here because the same crisis keeps showing up in both of our districts, and because the scale of what is at stake has made waiting for someone else to act an option neither of us can afford. 

This isn’t a story about bipartisanship for its own sake. It is about a system that is failing everywhere — in rural conservative counties and urban progressive centers alike — and about legislation that could fix it that’s been sitting in front of Congress long enough. 

Nobody decided jails should become America’s primary mental health and addiction infrastructure. It happened by default, as every upstream system struggled to keep pace with the scale of need. The result is a mismatch that has now persisted for decades, and the data is in: It isn’t working.

Roughly 63 percent of people in jail have a substance use disorder. We keep taking a medical problem, placing it inside a punitive institution and calling that a solution. It isn’t.  

In the first two weeks after release, the risk of dying from an opioid overdose is 40 times higher than in the general population. Not 40 percent higher: 40 times higher. Tolerance drops during incarceration, and without a medical handoff at the door, that first weekend can be the last. This unfolds against a backdrop of more than 70,000 overdose deaths nationwide each year.

One of us spent years as a Florida sheriff watching this play out, deputies answering the same calls to the same addresses with nothing different to offer. The other hears it from families in Old Bridge who have buried children, and from grandparents in Trenton raising grandchildren while their own........

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