Research from the Cookeville non-profit This is Living Ministries suggests women leaving incarceration are 12.7 times more likely to die of an overdose than the standard population.
Development Director Robert Frazier said one of the causes is that people will take the same dosage they used before they were incarcerated and their body cannot handle it. Frazier said another factor is that the majority of single-family homes rely on the mother, which puts much more responsibility and stress on those women.
“Women find their way into criminality differently,” Frazier said. “A lot of times they find their way through the pathways of trauma. Many ladies that you see in our prison system by merit of a codependent relationship traffic drugs.”
Frazier said the non-profit conducted the research as part of an effort to prove the organization’s work has gone from mainly restorative to actually life-saving. Frazier said he hopes the research will help bridge the gap between faith-based and secular addiction treatment programs.
“The interventions that we do in the faith-based sphere speak to the things that (Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration) has identified,” Frazier said. “Meaning forward trajectories, healthy coping patterns, and all of these things. We just achieve that in a way that may not be what they would present.”
Frazier said the statistic about post-incarceration overdose rates comes from a 2020 study titled “Reducing overdose after release from incarceration (ROAR).” Frazier said that study also showed that the number of female prison incarcerations has increased by over nine hundred percent since 1980.
“First, we’ve put this research together so we could make the case for our grants and we were able to get that,” Frazier said. “And then what we are doing is we’re taking and researching the interventions that we have performed based on this research and disseminating our findings to other programs.”
Frazier the non-profit has plans to conduct another study through its research division over the course of 2025.
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