At a recent Brennan Center for Justice Congressional briefing, “Funding Cuts to Health and Their Impact on Public Safety, law enforcement and public health leaders landed on the same conclusion: investing in community mental health crisis response and drug treatment leads to safer communities.
Most communities do not fail at preventing overdose because they lack compassion. They fail because uncertain funding streams force them to run life and death systems on unstable capacity. When federal funding suddenly pauses, even briefly, programs freeze services, staff leave and referral pathways break. But people do not stop needing this help. People lose touch with care at the exact moment risk rises.
They show up later, at higher risk, and in the places that cost the most to handle a crisis.
Who was in the room, and why it mattered
On January 14, 2026, the panel brought together voices that rarely share a stage, but depend on each other to move policy. Participants included Representative John Rutherford from Florida, local law enforcement leaders, family advocates, experts from the Global Health Advocacy Incubator, and the Brennan Center for Justice. Libby Jones joined as a Global Health Advocacy Incubator panelist from the Overdose Prevention Initiative, connecting frontline experience to the federal policy choices that determine whether communities fund early care or default to late response.
Law enforcement leaders underscored a familiar reality: communities keep asking police to manage health crises with enforcement tools, because policy choices underfund early care and overwhelm the back end of the system.
“Crisis does not disappear, it relocates”
The strongest through-line from the law enforcement perspective is that when funding cuts hit treatment and recovery infrastructure, crises do not vanish. It moves into county jails that were never designed to function as behavioral health stabilizers. That is the public safety impact of unstable capacity. Communities still pay the cost, but they pay it through overtime hours, repeat arrests, avoidable medical bills and grieving families. For people with substance use disorder, that relocation often means losing access to medication and support, then cycling through withdrawal, relapse and overdose risk in places built for custody, not care.
Reentry, in Rutherford’s words, is the whole point
Representative Rutherford offered a blunt measure of success that cut through the noise: “If we’re not using reentry to make people successful, our arresting them has been a waste of time… If people are not better for having come into your correctional facility than when they got there, we’re missing the boat.”
That perspective matters because it reframes reentry as a public safety outcome, not a social service “extra.” If someone leaves custody without treatment continuity, they return to the same conditions that led to arrest in the first place. Systems can either reduce the odds of relapse and overdose, or quietly engineer the same cycle again.
Reentry policy is overdose prevention policy in practice
Overdose death risk spikes immediately after release from custody, especially in the first two weeks. Research consistently shows this window carries extreme risk, making continuity of care a life-or-death policy decision.”
This is not only about risk. It is about preventability. Medications for opioid use disorder, including buprenorphine and methadone, reduce overdose risk, especially when paired with follow-up care. Yet fewer than half of U.S. jails provide these medications.
That is why speakers emphasized “warm handoffs,” real transitions where treatment continues, appointments get scheduled and coverage works on day one.
Families need help bridging the gaps to care
Advocacy voices reinforced what families experience when systems fail to connect care. When treatment and crisis response capacity weaken, families become the last line of support, often without guidance or resources.
This is why the briefing’s alignment mattered. It showed a rare convergence between public safety and public health communities on what works and what breaks when funding becomes unstable.
Public safety solutions do not need drama, they need reliability
The most effective public safety strategies build reliability so fewer people hit crisis in the first place. Medicaid continuity offers one of the clearest tools to scale reentry care. Federal rules have restricted Medicaid coverage during incarceration for decades, creating a patchwork where access depends on geography rather than medical need.
Congress has bipartisan bills that address this directly. The Reentry Act of 2025 (H.R. 2586) would allow Medicaid payment for certain services during the 30 days before release. The Due Process Continuity of Care Act (H.R. 1510) would allow states, at their option, to provide Medicaid services to eligible people held pretrial.
These proposals strengthen the bridge between custody and community care, precisely where avoidable overdoses cluster.
Why this briefing mattered
Libby Jones helped translate frontline reality into policy action that Congress can move now: stable funding, continuous coverage and evidence-based treatment access that does not end at the jail door.
If policymakers want fewer emergencies, fewer arrests and fewer funerals, they should stop treating funding and reentry as separate conversations. Predictable resources and continuity of care reduce overdose risk and repeat system contact. Public health funding is public safety funding.
We are grateful to the Brennan Center for Justice for including us in this conversation, for more information visit https://www.brennancenter.org/.
