Editor’s note: Kevin Light-Roth is an incarcerated freelance journalist. He and RANGE’s Aaron Hedge partnered on this story in order to interview people on both sides of the bars.
Amid a national crisis in which drug overdoses kill nearly 110,000 people each year, incarcerated people applying for an early release program in Washington prisons must go through drug treatment — even if they haven’t used drugs in years or decades.
It took 25 hard years for Thomas Mullin-Coston to get to this point: sitting in his counselor’s office at Washington Corrections Center in Shelton in the spring of 2023, working out the details of his release plan. Incarcerated since age 19, Mullin-Coston was 44 years old and finally eligible for Graduated Reentry, a transitional release program where incarcerated people nearing the end of their sentences can transfer from a long-term facility to a minimum custody work camp, then to a work release center in their community and finally, home. He was eager to get going. But after answering a few questions — things like where he would live when he got out and what he would do for work — his counselor uncorked a surprise.
“We were having this conversation about me getting out,” Mullin-Coston said. “Then she stopped and said before I could go anywhere I had to do a chemical dependency assessment. I thought she was playing around.”
It seemed silly: Mullin-Coston hadn’t done drugs for years and had no history of addiction.
But the requirement was no prank. Acting in direct response to the opioid crisis, the Washington legislature in 2023 passed SB 5502, a law requiring every person applying for Graduated Reentry — or GRE — to first submit to a substance use disorder evaluation and complete any treatment program the evaluation called for. The new screening mandate applied to all incarcerated people, even those who had never done drugs.
Unless he wanted to spend another year in prison, there was no way around it.
He resented being forced into an assessment he didn’t need and initially refused to participate for several months after the meeting with his counselor, “but I couldn’t do GRE without it, so I agreed. I was thinking I don’t have drug issues anyway and I won’t have to go.”
Early one morning in the spring of 2024, Mullin-Coston said he sat for an assessment with a substance use disorder specialist from American Behavioral Health Services (ABHS), a private company contracted by the state Department of Corrections (DOC) to assess and treat incarcerated people for addiction issues.
“This lady came in the interview room and told me, ‘just be honest,’” Mullin-Coston said. “She kept saying it’s hard to assess me because my drug use was as a teen and now I’m in my 40s.”
The ABHS counselor had reviewed his prison disciplinary file prior to their appointment, Mullin-Coston said, and honed in on a urine analysis (UA) test he had failed well over a decade before.
“She kept bringing up the dirty UA from 2009. I told her I smoked a joint socially at Christmas,” he said. (Illicit marijuana is readily available in Washington prisons, according to a DOC spokesperson). “My grandma made me promise to stop smoking weed at that point, and I did. I told this to the counselor. And based on that, she scored me high enough to place me in chemical dependency treatment,” different forms of which are administered by ABHS and the DOC’s Substance Abuse Recovery Unit (SARU).
ABHS CEO Tony Prentice said assertions that ABHS ever screened incarcerated people for its programming are “factually wrong,” insisting that that DOC, which runs state prisons, makes the referrals. He said ABHS operates only in facilities separate from prisons, one of which is in Spokane.
“ABHS only provides Intensive Inpatient Treatment for those who come to our agency,” Prentice wrote in an email to RANGE. “We do not control who comes or when they come, we simply provide treatment for those deemed medically necessary. … I’d like to make sure those accusations are refuted on the record. DOC controls the GRE program, we only provide treatment.”
But RANGE spoke with three people who said they were referred to ABHS for treatment by ABHS employees. And the company’s contract with the state specifies that ABHS is supposed to do the screenings.
Page 13 of the contract states, “The Contractor [ABHS] will complete chemical dependency screenings, intakes, TB tests, and chemical dependency treatment, which shall consist of group and individual counseling for offenders referred by the Department (DOC).” The contract also says the state will pay ABHS $23 an hour for individual intensive outpatient (IOP) care; $15 an hour is the group rate. If the places in the programs are not filled, ABHS does not get paid.
Filling seats
Kelly Olson, a member of the Lived Experience Team, a citizen advisory board for the Women’s Division of the Department of Corrections, said a woman who had no addiction issues “had to fake her substance use” to advance through the program. She was forced to invent stories about drug use that never happened, Olson said, and ABHS counselors refused to let her graduate unless she claimed to be “getting better”.
Jim Kopriva, a spokesperson for DOC, told RANGE that the Substance Abuse Recovery Unit (SARU), an arm of DOC, normally assesses incarcerated people for chemical dependency for GRE, but in some cases that work is “contracted out.” He did not know whether ABHS is ever asked to perform GRE substance abuse screenings.
When asked how much he expects ABHS to make from its contract with the state, Prentice declined to comment, but the contract lays it out — and the company stands to make a considerable profit.
For ABHS, the exclusive private contractor that provides chemical dependency services in Washington’s prisons, the law created an opportunity to expand its business. That expansion can be clearly seen in the amount of new money the company is set to receive — in 2022, ABHS made $6.7 million from its contract with DOC. In 2024, its first full year of operation since SB 5502 went into effect, the company could make as much as $9.1 million, according to the contract.
But the money won’t be dispensed automatically — in order to be eligible for the full payment, ABHS must fill the maximum number of seats in its treatment groups, and keep them filled at all times.
“So what happens if you don’t have enough guys to fill a class?” Maltman said. “You give up your money? They’re not doing that. They’ll use [SB 5502] to put guys in chemical dependency that don’t belong there. Then they get paid still.”
SB 5502 was designed to save lives. When the law went into effect in July of 2023, incarcerated people who had not previously had access to chemical dependency treatment suddenly could get help. (Senator Chris Gildon, the sponsor of SB 5502, did not return a request for comment.)
The law requires DOC to publish the number of incarcerated people who go through the treatment that law mandates for GRE. With 21 total months of data available, we compared the periods from July 2023 through March 2024 and July 2024 to March 2025. During that period, people referred to IOP — which Prentice said ABHS does not perform — increased from 1,284 to 2,192, an increase of 70%. For inpatient treatment — which Prentice said is the only type of care ABHS provides — the increase was more modest, from 847 patients to 934, a jump of less than 10%.
Jim Hoag, a substance use disorder professional at Kitsap Recovery Center who supervises drug court and behavioral health sentencing alternative programs, said counselors at ABHS are weaponizing a loophole in assessment guidelines known as “forced sobriety,” which allows a counselor to ignore lengthy periods of sobriety so long as they occurred in custody or a similar “controlled environment”.
“Time in prison doesn’t count as clean time,” Hoag said. “If someone had a drug and alcohol problem prior to incarceration but has been in prison 10 years clean, the 10 years don’t count. That’s how they get away with it. But it doesn’t make sense.”
Typically, only addiction behaviors that occurred in the previous 12 months can be considered, Hoag said.
“Every single person who takes an evaluation has to take chemical dependency,” said Steve Maltman, who has since been released. “I’ve never seen one person at [the Washington Corrections Center] take an evaluation and not have to do treatment.”
Maltman said he went through an ABHS assessment at Washington Corrections Center around the same time as Mullin-Coston, and like Mullin-Coston, was recommended for intensive treatment despite having been clean for several years.
“I had possession charges back in the day and that’s what [the ABHS counselor] wanted to talk about,” Maltman said. “And the fact that I tried cocaine one time when I was 16. I told her I was a drug dealer, not a drug addict. I haven’t even drank in six years. But she scored me at the highest level there is. This is their thing now. If you had a dirty UA in prison or you ever had a possession charge, they jam you into chemical dependency.”
Like Mullin-Coston, Maltman was told by a counselor that if he refused to participate in treatment, his application for GRE would not be processed and he would spend additional time in prison.
‘People openly use in prisons’
DOC spokesperson Kopriva said screening processes use a rigorous methodology established by the American Society of Addiction Medicine (ASAM). He denied that incarcerated people are referred to ABHS who don’t need treatment. He added that, if anything, DOC is not sending enough people to be treated for substance use disorder.
“It’s a much bigger problem than we currently have resources to solve is to equip people as they leave prison,” Kopriva said. “I don’t think we’re doing enough. There’s no way that we are responding to the degree of acuity of care that people need to deal with addiction. Prisons are not totally clean — people openly use in prisons. It’s a constant crisis of contraband coming in.”
Mullin-Coston also calls the notion that prisons are a drug-free “controlled environment” absurd.
“Anyone who tries to say there’s no drugs in prison has obviously never been here,” Mullin-Coston said. He pointed out that not only are drugs readily available in prisons, they are available in such quantities that incarcerated people often overdose. Data from the Washington Department of Corrections support his position: in 2023, the most recent year for which DOC provides statistics, there were 771 reported incidents involving drug contraband. DOC spokesperson Kopriva said that in the last year, about 350 incarcerated people were given Narcan, which reverses opioid overdoses. Thirty-four percent of unexpected deaths in DOC custody were drug-related.
Kopriva argued that sober time in prison does not rehabilitate people: he cited ASAM, which he said developed the criteria under which people are referred for treatment.
”Are prisons necessarily a therapeutic indicator? Is good behavior in prisons in terms of weaning off addiction a sustainable treatment? It is not. It is under total confinement and supervision,” he said. “… It doesn’t count.”
If you can’t do the time, you’ve gotta do the treatment
Another incarcerated man, Damen Bachman, took an assessment with an ABHS counselor at Stafford Creek Corrections Center and had an all but identical experience to those of Maltman and Mullin-Coston. “I told her I drank a little when I was out,” Bachman said. “But I’ve been locked up for 20 years. I don’t drink, I don’t crave alcohol. My crime had nothing to do with drugs.”
Bachman had once tested positive for marijuana, though, and that quickly became the counselor’s focus. “I had a dirty UA in 2011 or 2012 and that was what the whole thing turned into. I said, ‘Look, it was pot. Never meth, never heroin. You’ve tested me 20 or 30 times, you know what I’ve been doing.’ None of that shit mattered. She gave me the highest designation and the worst recommendation she could.”
Hoag described the process of assessing a client for chemical dependency issues as essentially indistinguishable from assessing a client for other mental health issues like schizophrenia and personality disorders. “It’s all covered in the DSM [Diagnostics and Statistics Manual],” Hoag said. “Whether it’s mental health or substance use disorder, it’s all diagnosed from the same book.”
During an assessment, Hoag explained, a substance use counselor uses a specific set of diagnostic criteria to determine whether a client meets the clinical definition of addiction. Criteria include a variety of addiction indicators, such as risky behavior associated with use, efforts to reduce use and the frequency of use. When a client meets the definition for substance use disorder, the counselor assigns a level of care based on how the client scores across six dimensions of environmental and psychosocial factors. IOP — intensive outpatient treatment — is the second highest level of care, reserved for people who are in the throes of serious addiction to hard drugs or are drinking in a dangerously heavy way.
When it comes to those who have no history at all of drug use, Hoag said, forcing them into treatment “shouldn’t be happening.” He points out that substance use disorder treatment is recognized under federal law as a form of medical treatment, and that under the law, even prisoners have the right to refuse medical care. Hoag suggested that the way to combat widespread misdiagnoses is for people who are improperly diagnosed to rely on the law to protect them and opt out.
But for those who refuse to play along with an ABHS assessment — however improper it might be — the consequences can be dire.
Olson described how women she works with have been traumatized by the experience of being forced into treatment programs they don’t need and having their release derailed as a result. One woman, Olson said, was two weeks from getting out when she was told her release date had been canceled.
“They said she could either do a treatment program or take an infraction and lose good time,” Olson said. “Either way you can’t go home. She still has a hard time even talking about it. She cries every time.”
Just as problematic is the way forced treatment can disrupt programming incarcerated people actually need, Olson said. “I’ve seen people one or two classes away from a college degree forced to drop out of school to do IOP.”
Olson is formerly incarcerated herself and recalls with painful clarity the stress of getting released. The strain is tremendous, she said, not just on the person reentering the community, but on her family and support network as well. To have a planned release date arbitrarily canceled devastates everyone involved and exponentially amplifies their stress.
The state should be flooding a person with resources and support at that point, she said, not throwing them into uncertainty.
Participants down on the program
According to those who have gone through the ABHS treatment curriculum, the program does little even for people with legitimate substance use issues.
“We played hangman on the whiteboard,” Maltman said. “We played board games. You can do coloring books. Sometimes there would be an hour, hour and a half with nothing to do.”
Kopriva could not discuss individual cases, but responding to this, he said there are four different levels of treatment ranging from outpatient care to medical monitoring of addiction.
“They might have some coursework that would qualify them for Level 2, outpatient, an hour a day, a couple hours a week kind of thing for skills as part of their kind of reentering,” Kopriva said.
But sources RANGE spoke with maintained some treatment programs for GRE were not very useful.
“The program was a laughingstock,” said Bachman, who completed treatment at Washington Corrections Center in May. “It was daycare for idiots. Half the time we sat there and stared into space.”
In group therapy sessions, Maltman said, the presence of so many people who didn’t share a history of drug addiction created a stifling atmosphere for those who did suffer from substance use disorder.
“Some guys never participated,” Maltman said. “They never spoke. It changes the mood in the room and makes guys who really are addicts not want to open up.”
He went on to say there were several in his IOP cohort “who never did drugs in their life. They were arguing every day that they shouldn’t be there. The counselor would say, ‘I don’t make that call.’ And I hear them. I shouldn’t have been there either. But I tried to stay out of the way and not make anybody who wanted to take the class uncomfortable.”
It is critical that the clients in an SUD therapy group believe the room is “safe and secure” and free of judgment, Hoag said. Heading a therapy session, his first goal is to “create a relaxed atmosphere, an environment where you’re willing to learn” and where clients can open up about intensely personal experiences. Clients have to be comfortable enough to be emotionally honest, but the awareness that there are people in the room who may not be empathetic or who may repeat what’s been revealed in the group can easily disrupt that comfort. It can be an impediment to treatment, Hoag said.
Cash for care people say they don’t need
For a law that was supposed to improve access to treatment, Mullin-Coston said, these sorts of outcomes are tragic. He even considers the ABHS treatment program a criminal enterprise.
“What’s going on is they take somebody that doesn’t have a condition, but they lie and say he does and they charge the state money for treating him for something they know he doesn’t have,” he said. “What if they did that with cancer? Took money for treating people who don’t have it? If I did something like that I’d get charged with a crime. It’s fraud.”
Prentice categorically denied that ABHS refers incarcerated people to the company’s treatment programs. He did not respond to RANGE’s question about the contract requirements.
Hoag stops shy of calling the practices of ABHS criminal. His opinion of the company’s conduct, however, is unequivocal.
“I’m not a lawyer,” Hoag said. “I can’t say whether it amounts to fraud. But I will say that it’s unethical.”
Nearly a year after the release plan meeting with his counselor, Thomas Mullin-Coston is waiting to begin an intensive 12-week treatment program.
“At this point I just want to do it to get it over with. It’s not going to do anything for me. It’s just going to take three months out of my life that I could be doing something to prep for release. It’s just ridiculous when you have someone who clearly doesn’t have a drug problem. And I definitely feel like there are people who really need this program and are passed over because they’re not as close to getting out.”
This happened to Blake Young, who came to prison 20 years ago and has grappled with addiction throughout his incarceration. Young said he reached out to ABHS staff at Washington Corrections Center “on multiple occasions,” requesting a spot in the chemical dependency program. But 20 years remain on Young’s term. He said ABHS counselors cited a policy that prohibits prisoners with long sentences from participating in treatment and turned him down.
Seeking treatment was a major step for Young, who said pride has always held him back from enrolling in a program. Being denied access left him feeling hopeless and adrift. “For someone like me, it’s hard to ask for help or lean on people,” Young said. “Now when I finally do it I get shot down.”
Kopriva said that though he’s not aware of a specific policy that denies treatment to people in the middle of a long sentence, but he did say the DOC lacks the resources to treat everyone in Washington prisons who struggle with substance abuse. So, even though some incarcerated people struggle with addiction throughout their incarceration, the agency concentrates the resources it does have on people at the beginning or end of a sentence. Kopriva said DOC sees those as the most crucial periods of treatment needs.
”You have most people going through withdrawal if they were supporting an active addiction on the outside,” Kopriva said. “Those first few weeks of intake when you’re getting people through the worst of withdrawal, and they’re acclimatizing to a new and obviously very stressful, challenging environment and personal situation. … It’s also critical on the other side, preparing people for release into the outside world without the structures that have supported the sobriety that are maintained in prison because they won’t have that very soon.”
Still, Kopriva said, many people overdose and die shortly after they are released. A report from the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence, said that between 2014 and 2019, at least 862 people died of overdose deaths after release, most with them within two weeks of release.
A person close to Young said he was discovered in his cell on January 24 — after RANGE had interviewed him — so intoxicated that he was sent to Washington Corrections Center’s Health Services. The incident prompted a lockdown of several hours, during which the population of Washington Corrections Center could not leave their cells or access common areas.
Mullin-Coston said the combination of enrollment quotas built into the ABHS contract and mandatory assessments built into the law creates massive incentive and opportunity for ABHS. Until someone takes a hard look at what the company is doing, he said, money intended to help people will be diverted and squandered.
“If they’re being told they have to refer seven out of 10 or whatever to get their money, of course they’re going to recommend people who don’t need to be there. Here I am, sitting in some healing circle — a guy who quit smoking weed 15 years ago. I’m just another ass in the chair keeping money flowing to the program.”
See previous RANGE prison coverage here and here.
Correction: The Washington Corrections Center is in Shelton, not Tacoma.
