S.F. is arresting more drug users. Its jail recovery programs reach only a fraction 13%
By Lucy Hodgman19% Maggie Angst24%
7/31/2026, 4:00:00 AM
Topics: County Jail, Recovery, San Francisco Sheriffs Office, San Mateo County Sheriffs Office, Cregg Johnson, Adrian Maldonado, Gage Plourde, Arthur Sanders, Tara Moriarty, S F, Pippi Jones, Thomas Wolf, Daniel Lurie, Vee Woodson, Sisters, Steve Adami, Jones, San Francisco, Bayview Hunters Point, Bay Area, San Bruno, Virginia, California, San Mateo County, Roads To Recovery, Scrabble, Department Of Public Health, Proposition 36, Positive Directions Equals Change, Choices, Chronicle, Lord Of The Flies
BS Summary: This article contains 27 faulty reasoning types, including Hasty Generalization, Pessimism Bias, and Post Hoc (False Cause), with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 7.6% saturation with 140 hits. Analysis detected 1,406 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,837 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 24.1% and a BS Rank of 13% (22,745 of 25,925 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 87.70% of the article peer group.
S.F. is arresting more drug users.
Its jail recovery programs reach only a fraction
Gage Plourde had used drugs off and on since his teens when he was arrested on drug-related charges in San Francisco and booked into County Jail No. 3 in San Bruno in January.
By spring, he had filled 2½ notebooks with “jewels” — inspirational thoughts about why it’s important he stay sober.
Plourre, 31, spent three months in the rotating cast of roughly 60 men who occupy the jail’s Roads to Recovery dorm, home to San Francisco’s in-custody substance abuse recovery program.
He passed the time drawing, playing Scrabble and taking meticulous notes during near-daily group counseling sessions.
“It’s just to remind me, for when I get out,” Plourde said.
“It’s helped me realize that there’s a lot out there — that there’s tons of reasons to get sober, but not a lot of reasons to get high.”
Though Plourde is one of a growing number of people arrested in San Francisco for drug use, he is also part of a smaller group of inmates receiving recovery treatment — one of roughly 80 people enrolled across the men’s and women’s jails in San Francisco’s recovery programs.
Local recovery advocates are generally in favor of in-custody programs, which they say can serve as critical intervention when those struggling with addiction are most vulnerable.
But critics worry that San Francisco’s current offerings are understaffed — with only about three employees working across both programs — and underused, guiding only a small fraction of the more than 15,000 people booked last year toward recovery.
Roads to Recovery founder Cregg Johnson, who is no longer involved with the program, called the current staffing levels “a joke and kind of disrespectful” in an interview with the Chronicle.
He also criticized the drop in the number of people in the program who go on to inpatient treatment after release.
Questions about the effectiveness of San Francisco’s recovery programs come as arrests of drug users have skyrocketed under Mayor Daniel Lurie, who has promised to crack down on street conditions and open-air drug use.
The city recorded more misdemeanor drug arrests and citations in the first four months of this year than in every full year from 2018 to 2024, a Chronicle analysis of police data found.
Many people in the city’s jails struggle with addiction.
About 44% of people booked into custody in the last year reported opioid or stimulant use and about 7% reported “risky alcohol use,” according to Department of Public Health data.
Plourde grew up in Virginia and bounced in and out of jails on both coasts, racking up theft and police evasion charges as he struggled with addiction.
Soon after Plourde was arrested in San Francisco, he was offered a spot in the voluntary program.
Most of the quotes in Plourde’s notebook come from Arthur Sanders, whom Plourde called “everybody’s case manager,” responsible for leading meetings, coordinating guest speakers and directing the men to inpatient treatment programs at the end of their jail stay.
Sanders leads discussions about addiction and life after jail in Roads to Recovery meetings, usually standing alone in front of dozens of men in the dorm’s cafeteria.
A large painting behind him shows a man walking from a black-and-white scene of people drinking on a curb into a colorful building of families, a sign declaring it a “drug free zone.”
The Roads to Recovery dorm looks otherwise like a typical jail, but its inhabitants have busy schedules of group therapy, yoga and pickleball classes.
Men are “screened multiple ways” and interviewed before they can move into the dorm, and there’s sometimes a waiting list for beds, said Tara Moriarty, a spokesperson for the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office.
There is typically no waitlist for the smaller women’s program called Sisters, which does not have a dedicated dorm.
“My philosophy is getting people to know themselves,” Sanders said.
“If you keep coming back to recidivism, then you don’t really know yourself.”
Participants in the program praised Sanders effusively, but he admitted to being stretched thin.
In April, he was scouting possible candidates to join him at the program full time.
The nonprofit Bayview Hunters Point Foundation, which administers Roads to Recovery and Sisters, had a contract for about $563,000 to run the programs during the last fiscal year, according to city records.
The budget can accommodate two additional employees, Moriarty said.
“Yes, staffing levels are low and Bayview Hunters Point has been running employment ads in hopes of hiring,” Moriarty said.
“It’s been challenging to find qualified candidates.”
When Johnson founded Roads to Recovery in the 1990s, that program alone had five full-time employees for the same number of inmates, he said.
Johnson, who left Roads to Recovery after about five years as director to found the nonprofit Positive Directions Equals Change, said he is “fed up” with what he sees as a shrinking emphasis on long-term inpatient treatment after custody.
“What we started was a pretreatment program,” Johnson said.
“This was a place where you were going to prepare and go into a program, so there’s not a lot of culture shock.”
In Johnson’s day, virtually all Roads to Recovery participants who weren’t facing state prison sentences entered inpatient programs after jail, he said.
Now, about 20% of Sisters participants and 25% of Roads to Recovery participants are on that trajectory, according to Moriarty.
Johnson is also wary of the county jails’ use of medications such as methadone and buprenorphine, commonly used to treat opioid addiction.
Medical professionals widely recommend medication-assisted treatment as a long-term way to treat opioid addiction, but Johnson worries that they keep participants "sedated" instead of meaningfully focused on sobriety.
These medications were rarely permitted when he ran the program, he said.
The share of participants on medication-assisted treatment plans has increased over the past decade, Moriarty said.
It generally varies from 10% to 20%.
Participants aren’t brought into the program until their withdrawal symptoms — which methadone and buprenorphine help treat — have abated, she said.
But Johnson acknowledged the difficulty of treating people who are incarcerated for short, inconsistent windows of time.
In the 1990s, Roads to Recovery treated people for a minimum of 90 days.
Now, the average length of stay across both the men’s and women’s programs is about a month.
Participants’ increasingly brief stays have made the programs less effective, said Thomas Wolf, who became a recovery advocate after years spent struggling with addiction.
It wasn’t until Wolf spent three months in jail after his sixth drug arrest that he was able to get sober, he said.
“It’s not that the city’s doing anything wrong,” Wolf said.
“Drug treatment in jail is always a good thing, but the way we’re set up in the state of California doesn’t really work that great because nobody’s around long enough to bear the fruits of actually going to treatment while they’re in jail.”
Wolf pointed to Proposition 36, a 2024 measure requiring harsher penalties for repeat theft and drug crimes.
(A 2025 Chronicle investigation found San Francisco had filed just a handful of drug cases.)
He’d like to see that measure used as an “accountability mechanism” for getting repeat drug offenders into treatment.
Wolf is also supportive of more funding for the state’s collaborative courts, which can order offenders into inpatient treatment.
Recovery advocate Steve Adami said in-custody treatment programs can serve as a “wake-up call” if they focus on holding participants accountable.
He cited San Mateo County’s Choices program as a model San Francisco could follow.
Choices started around the same time as Roads to Recovery, said former director Adrian Maldonado.
What set the program apart was that it was “self-run by inmates,” who made their own cell assignments and internally chose leaders to help guide the group.
Maldonado said this model, which he jokingly compared to “Lord of the Flies,” was perhaps “too radical” for its time.
San Mateo County retired the program in 2022 after almost three decades, Maldonado said.
A spokesperson for the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office did not respond to requests for comment about why the program ended.
But when Maldonado was an inmate in Choices, the program’s egalitarian ethos was what set him on a path toward recovery, he said.
He entered the program after a slew of drug charges in his 30s and spent about nine months there before moving to a residential treatment program for five years.
“I didn’t want to be there — I thought it was a cult,” he said.
“But I got on board enough to think that maybe I could stay clean.
That maybe it was possible I could have a different life.”
The sense of community that inspired Maldonado’s recovery can seem at odds with the rigid, often punitive environment of a jail, he said.
He sees a successful in-custody program as a compassionate “microsystem” at “the center of a very toxic environment.”
Incarcerated people are also a “hard, very vulnerable population to treat” in general, said Pippi Jones, who facilitates the Sisters program in San Francisco’s women’s jail.
She brings the benefit of lived experience to her work — she spent a year incarcerated across three county jails — and stories about her past help her build a rapport with inmates, she said.
“When I got out, I went to college,” Jones said.
“A lot of women come in here completely broken, completely helpless, hopeless.
They’re feeling like this is the end of the line.
And I’m like, ‘Actually, this is just the start.’”
On average, the women’s stays are shorter than the men’s, Jones said, so her focus is on giving participants as many coping tools as possible in a matter of days or weeks.
Practices such as breathing exercises, meditation and journaling are a main emphasis of the program, because it doesn’t offer the more specialized rehabilitation of inpatient treatment.
The meetings also provide a break from the typical atmosphere of the jail, which can veer between mundane and chaotic, said 30-year-old Vee Woodson.
For her, walking into a group therapy session feels like letting out a breath.
“It’s a relief,” she said.
“I used to be angry, always just blasting out and fighting and reacting.
It gave me security.
It made me feel better as a person.”
Woodson has been in and out of San Francisco’s jails for the past few years, struggling with addiction on the outside and returning to the program several times.
Plourde, meanwhile, said he was experiencing in-custody drug counseling for the first time.
The program was helpful, he said, but it didn’t make him any more interested in entering inpatient treatment after jail.
“I’ve never really felt like I needed it, because I’m pretty disciplined by myself,” Plourde said of inpatient care.
On the outside, he hoped he would look back on jail — and Roads to Recovery — as “just a speed bump.”
He has since been released.
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