Undercounted: Treatment options limited as drugs flow into U.S. jails

Here & Now Anytime

NPR

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4.1 • 953 Ratings

🗓️ 3 October 2025

⏱️ 27 minutes

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Summary

Statistics show about 60% of inmates have a substance abuse disorder, yet drugs are commonly smuggled inside U.S. jail facilities, contributing to overdose deaths in custody. And when jails have treatment options like methadone and Suboxone, there often aren't enough to go around. Here & Now’s Peter O’Dowd reports from a jail in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

And, Richard Graham died of an overdose in a Louisville, Kentucky, jail. As his family mourns the loss, they’re looking for answers. And so is the city; In 2022, Louisville Metro Council launched an investigation after a spike in overdose and suicide deaths. O’Dowd talks with Richard Graham’s family and Louisville jail officials about why overdoses are so common and what can be done to curb them.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for here and now anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software for technical computing and model-based design.
0:09.2	MathWorks, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at MathWorks.com.
0:17.5	WBUR Podcasts, Boston.
0:21.3	We get the call that my grandson is dead and in jail, dead.
0:29.7	This is a place where you hope that, okay, he's off the streets.
0:36.0	So now he's in a place where he's going to be safe.
0:40.3	Incarcerated people are under near constant surveillance.
0:44.3	More of them than ever are getting treatments for addiction.
0:47.6	So why are so many people still dying from overdoses in jail?
1:01.4	Yeah. overdoses in jail. This is here at now anytime from NPR and WBUR Boston.
1:05.3	I'm Chris Bentley.
1:17.7	About a thousand people died in American jails every year between 2019 and 2023,
1:20.7	according to federal data analyzed by the Marshall Project.
1:25.3	That's probably an undercount because statistics are hard to come by.
1:29.5	Many of those inmates died while awaiting trial.
1:32.6	Some of them were listed with no cause of death.
1:37.9	Peter O'Dowd set out to find out why so many people die in America's jails.
1:41.3	This is the last episode in our series on the topic.
1:44.6	If you missed the first two, check out the previous two episodes of Here and Now anytime. So today, Peter, your stories confront another leading cause
1:50.9	of death in American jails, overdoses. And part of the problem here is that people end up in
1:56.6	jail while suffering addiction and sometimes withdrawal symptoms, which there's supposed to be
2:02.0	treatment and emergency services available for, but is it just not getting to them in time?
	...

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