Time to End Vermont’s Sober House to Prison Pipeline

Published by VTDigger on February 10, 2020

by Tom Dalton

This commentary is by Tom Dalton, of Essex Junction, who is the executive director of Vermonters for Criminal Justice Reform. He is an attorney and a licensed alcohol and drug counselor.

Vermont has a sober house to prison pipeline that wastes hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars, derails lives and is often impossible to escape. Right now, conditions are ripe to fix this problem. And we should.

Sober houses are an important part of the recovery safety net and are the best option available to many people in need of a place to call home. We need more of them.

They also too often put vulnerable people in harm’s way. We need them to do better.

For example, sober houses commonly respond to a relapse or recurrence in the use of alcohol or other drugs by subjecting tenants to sudden discharge to unsafe settings like homelessness or incarceration. Sober house leaders say they discharge tenants who relapse to protect the other tenants. This is a legitimate concern. Yet tenants who experience a recurrence are particularly vulnerable and have legitimate safety concerns as well.

Take the case of sober house tenants under the supervision of the Vermont Department of Corrections. Corrections officials often mandate residence in a sober house. This even though sober houses can be high risk environments. Relapse to substance use is not uncommon in sober houses where groups of people in early recovery often live together. Stress can be high due to the interpersonal dynamics of living with strangers in close quarters, the challenge of coming up with rent (often weekly) and the struggle to overcome powerful cravings commonly experienced by those in early recovery. Corrections officials sometimes mandate residence in a sober house even when an individual has a safer option, such as living with parents.

To make matters worse, corrections officials often immediately respond to relapse or discharge with incarceration. They cite violations of conditions or lack of an approved residence, and often justify the response by claiming that there is no safe community option. Many who would otherwise be free spend six to 12 months unnecessarily and expensively incarcerated while they reapply to sober houses.

Sudden discharge from a sober house is dangerous. Sudden discharge often unnecessarily destabilizes people including in terms of housing, employment, mental health, parenting and recovery. Sudden discharge often increases the severity of a relapse and delays a return to sobriety. For example, a one-time use of marijuana that could have been safely addressed without any interruption in residence can easily result in months of heroin/fentanyl use if a tenant is subjected to sudden discharge and left with no ready option but to sleep on the couch of a drug-using friend.

Some sober houses currently discharge people for minor rule violations, on mere suspicion of use or based on the results of a drug test that records presence of a substance used days or weeks before. People are often discharged even though they are not currently intoxicated and a brief return to use has already ended. Such practices are often unfair, unnecessarily punitive and dangerous.

Although difficult to contemplate, it remains important to understand that people who experience sudden discharge from sober houses experience a long list of preventable horrors including homelessness, rape, sex trafficking, termination of parental rights, incarceration and fatal overdose. The stakes could not be higher.

Corrections officials acknowledge that the sober house to prison pipeline is a serious challenge for Vermont’s already overcrowded prisons. Stakeholders both inside and outside of corrections are coming to recognize that we need a new approach. People who relapse while living in sober houses should generally be restabilized in the community — either maintained in or returned to sober houses, not incarcerated.

National experts invited by state leaders to make recommendations under the Justice Reinvestment process have called on corrections officials to establish “evidence-based norms and expectations for contracts and certifications for sober and recovery housing providers, including allowing for use of medications and restricting evictions due to relapse.” Lawmakers should broaden this mandate to include the Vermont Department of Health and the full range of sober houses.

Many people who use drugs are vulnerable and disempowered. This is often due to poverty, housing insecurity, trauma history, mental health disorders, substance use disorders, criminal justice system involvement and marginalization based on race and other characteristics. Their legal rights are often systematically disregarded. When this happens, most have no effective recourse.

For example, most sober houses in Vermont routinely evict tenants without complying with eviction statutes. And some sober houses routinely discriminate against people who participate in medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder, even though such discrimination violates federal law. Yet tenants in Vermont sober houses have been almost universally unable to effectively assert the important legal rights and protections they ostensibly enjoy under existing law.

It is in this context that legislators are considering H.783, an act related to sober houses. H.783 would permit sudden eviction from sober houses, currently a violation of civil law. The well-meaning intent of the bill is to protect tenants who may be triggered by the relapse of another resident, and limit expense and liability for sober house operators. But exclusion from court-supervised eviction processes designed to protect tenants from sudden removal from the safety and sanctity of their homes will put these especially vulnerable tenants at particularly high risk. Such an exclusion should not be implemented unless tenants living in sober houses are provided with new protections that are specifically designed to keep them safe.

Legislators should ensure that sober house tenants who experience relapse or eviction are not subjected to incarceration. That sober houses comply with non-discrimination laws particularly as related to medications used to treat mental health and substance use disorders. That sober house tenants have and can effectively assert substantial due process protections, especially as related to sudden eviction. That sober houses are bound by a legal duty of care to tenants, including tenants who experience relapse, and are required to make a good faith effort to retain tenants or transition them to other safe housing. And that sober houses demonstrate the capacity to restabilize tenants who experience a relapse without subjecting tenants to termination, homelessness or incarceration.

Vermont’s sober housing system must have the capacity to continuously house and restabilize people who experience a recurrence of their substance use disorder in the community — without subjecting them to sudden discharge to dangerous settings like homelessness or incarceration. The Legislature should task the Vermont Agency of Human Services with building this community capacity statewide within the next two years.

Put simply, vulnerable Vermonters desperately need sober houses and corrections officials to respond to relapse with immediate recovery support, not immediate eviction and incarceration.

Vermont has an opportunity to create the best and most effective sober housing system in the country. This will require not just more sober houses but also sober houses that embrace new approaches designed to continuously support recovery and maximize conditions of safety, especially when tenants need it most.