The Least of Us by Sam Quinones

Author:Sam Quinones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

About six months later, one afternoon in the spring of 2016, Keith Everhart, the sheriff of Hardin County, met with a local steel-factory owner. Everhart had been urging local businesses to hire recovering addicts, and did the same now with this factory owner.

He talked on about how folks looking to get away from drugs needed a hand up. The community needed to come together on this, because in tiny, rural Hardin County, surrounded by cornfields and crisscrossed by railroads, the opioid addiction problem, as much as folks had tried to ignore it, was out of control. I met Everhart on one of my trips through Ohio.

In the middle of the conversation, he told me, the mill owner stopped him.

“You hired any of ’em at your department?” he asked.

Keith Everhart looks every bit the small-county sheriff. He began working for the department as a deputy in 1997, right out of high school. He wears his brown hair in a sharp crew cut, dips Kodiak tobacco, watches Fox News, and attends the same small, rural Methodist church in which his parents raised him.

There is, therefore, every reason to imagine Keith Everhart as immovable regarding ideas that in US law enforcement have been conventional wisdom for a long time. One of those is that addicts need to be in jail. Indeed, that is where Everhart put them for most of his career as a deputy, and then as the supervisor of Hardin County’s drug task force. “After that it wasn’t my problem anymore,” he said.

But as this epidemic began calling on Americans to reexamine ideas, customs, and policies once thought settled, law enforcement showed itself to be among the most nimble and willing to innovate. Among that group is Hardin County sheriff Keith A. Everhart.

He was elected sheriff in 2009. His arrest rolls featured the same names every couple of months, usually for the same small-time property or possession crimes. Hardin County had always lived at a safe distance from problems townspeople read about in Toledo, or Dayton, or Columbus, or Los Angeles. Now those problems involved people from down the street. “I got into the position I’m in and realized I don’t know it all,” he told me. “You gotta open up your mind a little bit and take chances.”

When Judge Barrett opened his Recovery Court in the Hardin County Courthouse, he asked Everhart to be part of the team that met every Monday morning before court to discuss each participant’s progress. On the Recovery Court team, Everhart saw that the inability to find work hamstrung many recovering addicts. So he started drumming up support for hiring recovering addicts. This is what took him to the office of that steel-mill owner south of town.

Everhart responded to the owner’s question that day by explaining how difficult it was for law enforcement to hire people with drug addiction and felony records. Officers go through rigorous vetting, including psychological testing and financial audits, not to mention lengthy tactical training—all to be prepared to handle problems on the street presented by, very often, people addicted to drugs or alcohol.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.