Mark Warner visits Chesterfield County Jail inmates as part of addiction recovery program

CHESTERFIELD COUNTY, Va. (WRIC) — Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) met with inmates at Chesterfield County Jail on Tuesday as part of the county’s Helping Addicts Recover Progressively (HARP) program.

Warner spent the afternoon speaking with inmates and hearing their stories about how they ended up in jail and how HARP has helped them recover from addiction.

Warner spoke about how different Chesterfield’s approach to addiction treatment and rehabilitation is to how law enforcement treated the issues when he was Governor of Virginia in the early 2000s.

“When I was governor, there weren’t people like [Chesterfield Sheriff Karl Leonard] and [Maj. Eric Jones] here. It was all about who’s going to be toughest on crime,” said Warner. “The whole notion of reentry was, maybe people paid lip service to it but didn’t do anything.”

HARP was started by Sheriff Leonard in 2016 and has since garnered significant attention. The program was the subject of a Discovery+ documentary which released in 2022 and, in 2023, country singer Jelly Roll visited Chesterfield’s jail to meet with participants in the program .

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