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BRIGHAM CITY — This time was going to be different.
It was November 2018, and 22-year-old Parker Kelly had just been released from jail. He was sober and optimistic; he’d recently met a man who’d helped him find God. And this time, he told his mother over lunch, he was going to stay that way.
"Maybe this is the one," his mother thought to herself, with cautious hope. "This is the turning point." Maybe, Stacey Winn Hedrick thought, she’d get back the son she knew: the gregarious class clown, the star athlete, the talented artist.
"As a mom, that’s a dangerous place to be, to have that little bit of hope," Hedrick recalled on a recent afternoon, seated in front of a large photo of Kelly in the family's living room. "I was so excited."
Four days later, just one week after Kelly walked out of the Weber County Jail, that hope was gone. Hedrick was on a camping trip in Montana when she got the news: Kelly's roommate had found him in the bathroom, unconscious. It took her son just two minutes to die of a heroin overdose, Hedrick was later told by doctors, and several hours to be discovered.
Stories like Parker Kelly’s — of people who leave county jails only to end up back behind bars, or worse — are not uncommon. While some Utah jails, including the one in Weber County, offer programming and counseling to inmates, those kinds of services tend to feel much less accessible once people leave jail and enter back into society. Oftentimes, the challenge isn't a lack of community resources for formerly incarcerated people, criminal justice experts say. It's that many people don’t know the resources are out there or how to access them.
Weber County officials have seen this kind of disconnect time and again, according to sheriff’s office spokesman Lt. Joshua Marigoni. Now the Weber County Sheriff’s Office is looking to "bridge the gap," as Marigoni puts it, through a new program that will connect inmates to helpful services and organizations in the outside community. The goal is to help newly released people get back on their feet by making sure they have the resources to find work, housing, substance abuse treatment, mental health counseling or any other services they might need.
If the Weber County program proves successful, officials hope it will serve as a model for other jails around the state.
"The issue is that we’ve got some resources in the community to help some of these folks, but by the time they get out and discover them it’s too late," Weber County Commissioner Gage Froerer said. Under the new program, Froerer said, "they have a plan when they come out and they’re not lost."
The Weber County program builds on statewide efforts in recent years to reduce recidivism as Utah's prison population grows. The population at the Utah State Prison grew by 257 inmates in the past year — the largest 12-month increase in at least 20 years — and a new state prison under construction is estimated to cost as much as $800 million.
While county leaders are still figuring out exactly what the program will look like, they expect that a newly hired case manager will help inmates keep track of the programming they participate in while they're in jail, assist them in finding services out in the community, and then follow up after the person is released to make sure they've been successfully connected to those services. The county is currently reaching out to local organizations, ranging from nonprofits to employers to health care providers to churches, to see who exactly might be interested in participating.
Hedrick and Kelly’s sister, Allie Norris, believe Kelly could have benefited from the program, and hope it keeps at least one other family from going through the same trauma they've experienced.
"There’s a small window, and it’s really critical," Norris said. "If they plant that one little seed in them and say, ‘Hey, this is your chance to change and we have resources for you'…that could help astronomically with the problem."
A 2018 study from the Utah Foundation found that 14 of Utah's 26 jails had substance abuse programs in place. The Weber County jail is one of them — it offers substance abuse treatment and a range of other in-house services, including mental health counseling, vocational rehabilitation, Alcoholics Anonymous programming and parenting classes.
One of the challenges of offering such programming within county jails, however, is that people don't tend to stay there very long. This makes establishing support networks in the outside community especially important, according to Jesse Jannetta, a senior policy fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., who studies jail reentry and recidivism.
"If you’ve got good programming but it takes several months to finish it, that’s not going to be helpful for people who are going to be in jail for much less time than that," Jannetta said. "Reentry support work has to happen predominantly on the community side, because there may not be enough time to work with people in jail before they get out."
Spending even just several days in jail can uproot a person's life, Jannetta pointed out. In that time, somebody can lose a job, lose their housing, lose support from their family.
"We often think about reentry in the prison context; you’ve been gone away for a long time and that’s why you need to build your supports," Jannetta said. "But for people who might only be a paycheck away from not making rent, you could end up having to rebuild a lot of things in your life after a week or less in jail."
Weber County officials hope to make their program "as inclusive as possible," Marigoni said, extending support both to people who spend many months in jail and to people who spend just a few days there.
The case manager will point people toward health care providers for substance abuse treatment and mental health counseling. But county officials are also looking into starting a job training program in the jail, which would then connect trainees to schools or employers once they're released. They also would like to offer some kind of transportation option for people who are released from jail and don't have any way to get home. One idea, Marigoni said, is placing electric scooters outside the jail.
While Parker Kelly’s outlook may have changed in jail, the reality of the life he came back to didn’t. He returned to the same social circles; the same bathroom that, as he previously told his mother, for some reason triggered in him an urge to get high; and, within a matter of days, the same dangerous habits. With a plan and the right resources, his family believes, his story may have taken a different direction.
"Without the family, the community and the jail programs working together, they don’t have a chance to recover, especially if they end up going back to the same people and the same situation," Hedrick said.
Rep. Kelly Miles, R-Ogden, is one of several state legislators who have been involved in planning discussions with Weber County officials, though Miles noted that he is volunteering his time in a personal, rather than official, capacity.
"I just don’t think we do a very good job as a society bridging the gap or helping them acclimate to their life in the free world," Miles said. "These individuals need to take personal responsibility and they need to step up and they need to do their share. But at the same time … I think we need to step up as local communities."
Miles said he hopes the Weber County model, especially if extended to other jails or prisons in Utah, helps to bring down the "astronomical" cost of incarceration at the state level. But his enthusiasm for the program extends beyond policy, he said.
"We all have loved ones or family or friends who have been through the system and we hope someone is looking out for them," Miles said. "If nothing more, it’s the right thing to do to reach out and help our fellow men."
