LEONARDTOWN, Md. — The Commissioners of St. Mary’s County unanimously approved the fiscal year 2025 agreements between the St. Mary’s County Health Department and the St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s Office Detention and Rehabilitation Center, which amount to four grants worth a combined total of $1,191,309. These grants will fund the STOP, Five County, Maryland Community Justice Treatment, and Day Reporting programs, which provide mental health services in prisons, jail-based medication-assisted treatment, reentry support, and other treatment programs. These services promote recovery, resiliency, health, and wellness for individuals who suffer from behavioral health disorders.
These programs provide a vital lifeline to those who are caught in what The BayNet Crime Desk described in September 2024 as a “downward spiral where one criminal act leads to another, making rehabilitation increasingly difficult.”
It is the purpose of the St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s Office Detention and Rehabilitation Center to support those individuals and, through further programs like Work Release, reincorporate them back into society under the close supervision of the Community Supervision Unit.
The aforementioned Day Reporting program has a similar purpose, incarcerating individuals in their place of residence rather than in a prison and acting as a “proven… cost-effective and reliable method of ensuring certain convicted offenders receive punishment commensurate with their offense, while also ensuring public safety is not compromised” (St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s Office).
The funding for the program will not be subtracted from the county budget but will instead be taken out of the already existing sheriff’s office budget.
This funding comes in the wake of serious financial issues that the sheriff’s office’s detention center and its associated programs have encountered in recent months. These issues stemmed from funding delays and shortfalls related to the Residential Substance Abuse Treatment (RSAT) Grant, which was also addressed in Tuesday’s meeting.
RSAT Grant Issues
In the same meeting, the Commissioners of St. Mary’s County unanimously approved the RSAT Grant, which was awarded to the St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s Office to provide medication-assisted treatment (MAT) and counseling to incarcerated individuals.
The grant itself amounts to $189,091, which is more than $30,000 short of what the Maryland Governor’s Office of Crime Prevention and Policy had originally promised due to a shortened grant term and delays in issuing the grant.
Representatives of the St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s Office requested a 25% non-federal match that amounts to $64,036, which will be sourced from salary and fringe funds for offender reentry case managers—funding that is already within the office’s current budget.
The grant enables the sheriff’s office to provide MAT and mental health counseling to incarcerated individuals, which is potentially life-saving care that is required now more than ever.
According to Warden Mary Ann Thompson, “We have such a mental health crisis, and with so many coming in the jail… this morning… we have 257 on the incarcerated count, and 188 of them are identified as having mental health [issues]. Thirty-one percent of them are unstable.”
Despite the necessity of MAT and counseling services provided by the sheriff’s office, officials encountered significant obstacles in securing funding for their work.
“We’ve had to scrape and scratch to get grant money in order to take and pay for it,” Warden Thompson told the commissioners.
While Maryland House Bill 116 mandates MAT, the sheriff’s office has had to rely on separate grants to fund its work. As a result of intense competition for Opioid Operational Community Grants, its funding was already minimal when it began encountering delays and shortfalls with the RSAT Grant. Even after acquiring some of the original funding, the grant expires on June 30, 2025, after which the sheriff’s office will need to go through the application process again.
Notably, despite the funding gap, the sheriff’s office continued to provide MAT to incarcerated individuals.
To address this issue in the future, the sheriff’s office has been working with the Correctional Administrators Association to lobby for a bill currently in the Maryland Senate—Senate Bill 942—but its fate remains uncertain.
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