Abstract

At the intersection of drug policy, the opioid crisis, and fragmented care systems, persons with opioid use disorder (OUD) in the United States are significantly vulnerable to contact with the criminal legal system (CLS). In CLS settings, provision of evidence-based treatment for OUD is variable and often secondary to punitive approaches. Linkage facilitation at every touch point along the CLS Sequential Intercept Model has potential to redirect persons with OUD into recovery-oriented systems of care, increase evidence-based OUD treatment connections, and therefore reduce CLS re-exposure risk. Research in this area is still nascent. Thus, this narrative review explores the state of the science on linkage facilitation across the varied CLS contexts, including general barriers, facilitators, and opportunities for using linkage facilitation for OUD treatment and related services. Following the CLS Sequential Intercept Model, the specific CLS contexts examined include community services, police encounters, the courts (pre- and post-disposition), incarceration (pre-trial detention, jail, and prison), reentry (from jails, prisons, and unified systems), and community supervision (probation and parole). Examples of innovative linkage facilitation interventions are drawn from the Justice Community Opioid Innovation Network (JCOIN). Areas for future research and policy change are highlighted to advance the science of linkage facilitation for OUD services in the CLS.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

8-29-2024

Notes/Citation Information

© The Author(s) 2024. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1186/s40352-024-00291-8

Funding Information

This work was jointly supported by the JCOIN Network (UG1DA050065, U01DA050442, and UG1DA050069) and the Consortium on Addiction Recovery Science (CoARS), both of which are funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) through the National Institute of Health Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative. Additionally, the activities of individual authors were supported by NIDA (R25DA037190 & L30DA056979, Satcher; K23DA048161, Drazdowski; R24DA051950, Sheidow & McCart; DP1DA056106, Schultheis; K01DA053391 & L30DA056944, Vest; K01DA056654, del Pozo) and the Health Resources and Services Administration (T32HP32520; Satcher). Preparation of this article was supported in part by the Family Involvement in Recovery Support and Treatment (FIRST) Research Network, which is co-funded by NIDA and the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (R24DA051946; PI: Hogue). Publication of this article was supported by the Lifespan/Brown Criminal Justice Research Program on Substance Use and HIV (R25DA037190). The funders played no role in the study design, data collection, analysis, and interpretation of data, nor the writing of this manuscript.

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