This podcast episode is the fifth in Just Science’s Community-based Solutions for Substance Use Challenges season, and discusses the importance of peer support services for prison inmates as they re-enter the community after incarceration, and specifically looks at the work of New Jersey’s Path to Recovery program.
In this Just Science podcast episode, host Dr. Lawrence Mullen talks with Dr. Nicole Swiderski and Jass Pelland, of New Jersey’s Path to Recovery program, about how the New Jersey State Parole Board’s 2021 Comprehensive Opioid Stimulant and Substance Use Program (COSSUP) Award grantee supports peer recovery and other services that help people with a substance use disorder as they navigate community re-entry after they are released from prison. The podcasters discuss some of the challenges and barriers faced by those individuals during community re-entry, which the Path to Recovery program was created to alleviate. The program helps with challenges such as navigating community supervision requirements, applying for identification cards or jobs, locating housing and treatment services, and avoiding the increased risk of drug overdose. The podcasters discuss their backgrounds and what led them to their current involvement in Path to Recovery, as well as how Path to Recovery aims to help participants through the community re-entry process by providing peer health navigators as partners to parole officers. They discuss what it is like to navigate community re-entry with the stigma of having a history of incarceration and the role that peers and peer recovery support programs play in the recovery and re-entry process.