National Criminal Justice Conference Highlights Advances in Medication Assisted Treatment to Address the Nation’s Heroin Epidemic

Focusing on cutting edge topics in corrections and the national heroin epidemic, the 5th Annual Residential Substance Abuse Treatment Training and Technical Assistance (RSAT TTA) Workshop will be held in Providence, July 26-27, 2016, at the Omni Providence Hotel. Michael Botticelli, Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), will keynote the conference on “The Critical Role of Corrections in Addressing the Opioid Epidemic.”
 
The RSAT TTA Workshop is an annual meeting of corrections leaders from all U.S. states and territories, focusing on policy issues and evidence-based practices for substance use treatment and recovery in jails and prisons across the country. This year, the focus is on the impact of medication assisted treatment (MAT) on both improving inmate recovery rates from opioid addiction and on increasing the chances of reentry and reintegration success. MAT is part of contemporary standards of care for the treatment of people with substance use disorders (SUDs) and research has clearly shown that MAT can reduce both post-release relapse and recidivism.
 
The Annual Workshop is part of the Residential Substance Abuse Treatment Training (RSAT) and Technical Assistance (TTA) program, funded by the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) and administered by Advocates for Human Potential, Inc. (AHP). Project Director and AHP Senior Scientist Andrew Klein, Ph.D. said, “It is clear that failure to follow the lead of prisons and jails that have pioneered the establishment of medication assisted treatment for appropriate reentering inmates are guaranteeing that the majority will return within one to three years.”
 
Mr. Botticelli will speak on Tuesday, July 26, at 8:15 a.m. Additional workshop topics include: MAT programming policy considerations, trauma specific treatment, and strategies for advancing MAT guidelines. Other speakers include representatives from BJA, AHP, and Departments of Corrections across the country, including Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky. The full itinerary is available at the RSAT TTA website: www.rsat-tta.com.
 
About Residential Substance Abuse Treatment (RSAT) Technical Assistant and Training (TTA)
The Residential Substance Abuse Treatment (RSAT) Technical Assistant and Training (TTA) is a Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) funded program provided by Advocates for Human Potential, Inc. (AHP) in partnership with Treatment Alternatives for Safe Communities (TASC) and AdCare Criminal Justice Services (ACJS). For the last six years, AHP and its partners have directed BJA’s training and technical assistance program for federally funded prison and jail substance abuse treatment and reentry programs. The Annual Workshop is held for federally funded prison systems in all 50 states and U.S. territories to discuss advances in the corrections field. RSAT TTA recently produced a training video on the nation’s first three pioneering prison MAT programs and an accompanying manual. In this fiscal year, AHP will launch a new TTA initiative—the development of RSAT program standards based on evidence-based and promising practices. To develop these standards, AHP will organize a working group of RSAT leaders from across the country to draft tentative standards to disseminate to all state administrators for discussion. For more information, visit www.rsat-tta.com.


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