Judge Joel Cunningham is rooting for each person in the small group that comes into his courtroom every Tuesday morning. After a decade running the Halifax County Recovery Court program, he knows what to say to the participants, no matter where they are in their recovery journey.
On an October Tuesday, he addressed participants who had made strides in their process to recover from substance use disorder, as well as those who were struggling.
As each of the eight people approached the bench in the Halifax courtroom, Cunningham announced the number of days that they’d been clean.
“24 substance-free days”
“73 days of sobriety”
“Six substance-free days… . And your six days are just as important as whoever has the most days in here.”
“159 days” — which was met with a big round of applause from the others in the group.
Recovery court is a rehabilitation-based court program for nonviolent criminal offenders with substance use disorder, or SUD. It provides judicial supervision, treatment and individual and group therapy with the goal of reducing recidivism and keeping folks in active recovery.
Individuals participate voluntarily in order to avoid jail time for their offense.
Cunningham started the recovery court program in Halifax in 2016, the same year he retired. He runs the program in his retirement, after about 20 years as a judge.
To a participant doing well in the program, Cunningham offers encouragement and advice during the weekly courtroom meetings.
“It’s really hard to fathom how you have transitioned from the person you were on day one of recovery court to the person you are now,” he said to one man in a recent meeting. “We like who you are now.”
The man responded, “I do too.”
Learn more on The Cardinal: News of Virginia podcast
Host Lisa Rowan talks with reporter Grace Mamon about the proposed Halifax County recovery campus: what’s driving the project, the challenges it faces, and how it could reshape recovery efforts in rural Virginia.
But progress in recovery isn’t linear, and relapses are often part of the journey, Cunningham said.
For a woman who had relapsed and been arrested, standing before the judge in handcuffs and a county jail jumpsuit, Cunningham had stern but caring words.
“You don’t look like yourself today, and that concerns me, because I want to see you back healthy-looking again,” he said. “The recovery court team is not giving up on you because we’ve seen your potential, but we need to understand why you did this and minimize the chances of it happening again.”
In the almost 10 years since Cunningham started the program, he’s seen close to 60% of participants maintain long-term active recovery, he said.
He wants the program’s success to continue, but he has bigger ideas for the future, too.
Cunningham, who is also the chair of the Virginia Joint Commission on Recovery Housing, imagines a full-scale campus with wraparound services to aid recovery: housing, transportation, workforce development, family reunification services, medical treatment and life skills programming.
Housing is the crux of this project, which is called the Halifax County Recovery Campus, and is an integral part of the recovery process, Cunningham said.
“The individuals who come to recovery court with stable, safe places to live are more successful than those who are homeless or have homes in deplorable conditions,” he said in an interview.
The Halifax County Recovery Campus is more than just Cunningham’s dream. Fundraising is underway for the project, which would be the first of its kind in the Southside Virginia region, and Cunningham said he hopes to see construction begin in 2027.
On top of changing individual lives, the campus would positively impact the local and regional economy in the form of lowered health care and criminal justice costs, crime reduction and increases in the labor force, he said.
“I don’t view this as something that would be nice to do,” Cunningham said. “It’s something we have to do if we’re going to save our community, if we’re going to keep growing, keep attracting industry.”
‘An absolute necessity’ in a region with few options
The Joint Commission on Recovery Housing was created two years ago by the Virginia Supreme Court’s specialty dockets program to address the need for recovery housing in the state.
Recovery housing is a term that refers to safe and sober living environments created to help individuals maintain sobriety.
In its concept proposal for the Halifax County Recovery Campus, the commission acknowledges the lack of recovery housing options in the region.
Cunningham chairs the commission, which also includes Supreme Court of Virginia judges, behavioral health experts, Virginia Department of Corrections staff and Virginia Housing staff, among others.
“There is a shortage of safe and affordable rental housing in Halifax County, and the presence of certified recovery housing is non-existent,” the JCRH concept proposal says.
The closest accredited recovery house is an all-women’s facility in Nathalie, which is over 30 miles away. Many individuals travel to the Richmond area to find recovery housing, the proposal says.
Larry Berkely, who lives in Halifax, went to North Carolina to find recovery housing. He lived in transitional housing there for about a year while he worked and saved up for his own place.
This longer timeline was helpful, said Berkeley.
“When you hit rock bottom, 30 days doesn’t cut it,” he said. “We didn’t have anything like that in this area [Southside].”
The Virginia Association of Recovery Residences, which accredits recovery housing developments in the state, lists 42 recovery residency operators in Virginia. Almost half of them are in Richmond, where VARR is based.
Other than Nathalie, Martinsville is the only Southside locality with an accredited facility.
Berkeley graduated from different recovery court programs several times between 2002 and 2019, relapsing each time before graduating from Cunningham’s program in Halifax in 2019.
He’s been sober since then.
“I’ve finally got myself together,” he said. “I’ve got six years, I’m working on my seventh.”
The regular check-ins and other requirements at Cunningham’s recovery court program made it the one that “stuck,” he said — plus the timing was right for him, which is a huge factor.
“I didn’t take it to heart before that, I wasn’t serious about it,” Berkeley said. “The other programs were good programs, they just didn’t work for me.”
He said that he thinks the recovery campus project will make the Halifax recovery work even more successful.
“Housing is very important,” Berkeley said. “If you have nowhere to go, and you go back to your same setting, you’re going to fall back into your old ways.”
This was the case for Dewey Cash, who graduated from the Halifax recovery program about four years ago. He had been through several other recovery programs over many years.
“The issue was, every time I came home, I was back in the same environment,” Cash said. “I was still living in a household with people that were actively using. Thank God for the structure of drug court. That held me accountable while I had to stay there until I was able to save up to get my own place.”
Cunningham and Halifax County’s Commonwealth’s Attorney Tracy Martin have seen this proven time and again.
“I would say having a safe place to stay is an absolute necessity for long-term recovery,” Martin said.
Martin evaluates recovery candidates and accepts eligible participants into the program. She’s been working with Cunningham since the program started in 2016.
The program does not accept people who have committed violent criminal offenses or drug dealers, with a narrow exception for “low-level drug dealers who are only dealing to supplement their habit,” she said.
“For the most part, we accept people with less severe charges, so folks who are looking at zero to a few years of jail time on the traditional side of court. We’re not talking about people who are facing 15 to 20 years,” Martin said.
People who have a high risk to reoffend are also eligible for the program, she said. The court will accept someone with a long criminal history of misdemeanors — offenses like property crimes and drug possession charges, which can be related to substance use disorder.
The program has had participants who are homeless, who live in hotels or who are in living environments where there is active drug use, Martin said.
“When there are drugs or alcohol in active use in the home on a regular basis, and if that’s their only place to go, their challenges in not using can become insurmountable,” she said.
And unless there are local options, some folks aren’t willing to live in recovery housing at all, Cash said.
“When you first start to get clean, you’re already going through these scary things, and you can’t add the thought of leaving close to home,” he said. “My brother is in active addiction and that’s the scariest part for him, leaving what’s familiar.”
When recovery court participants do have the resources to succeed, the work is incredibly rewarding, Cunningham said.
“When I see them change, when I see their eyes brighten, when I see them joyful about life again — and not just happy, but joyful — that’s all the motivation I need not to be discouraged,” he said.
Impact beyond individuals
Recovery efforts like the Halifax campus project also benefit the wider community, Cunningham said.
Recidivism rates in Virginia are lower among people who have completed recovery court, according to data in the concept proposal. There’s an 18% recidivism rate for folks who complete the program, lower than the rate for those who don’t complete it, which is 29%, and for all offenders, which is 46%, according to the data.
Lowering recidivism reduces a region’s criminal justice, incarceration and health care costs — costs which taxpayers contribute to.
Virginia is facing high overdose mortality rates and a labor shortage, which is part of a broader national trend. Without future recovery housing, these problems could get worse, according to the concept report.
There were over 2,200 overdose deaths in Virginia in 2023, which is an increase of more than 50% from the 1,400 reported in 2018, says the report. In Halifax County specifically, the overdose mortality rate has more than doubled in that time period and is almost twice that of the overall state.
When people stay in recovery, the effects ripple out into the rest of the community, said Kristin Tiedeman with the Fletcher Group, a Kentucky-based nonprofit that works in rural communities to expand recovery resources.
It has been involved with the Halifax Recovery Center project almost since its inception, Tiedeman said.
A member of the Joint Commission on Recovery Housing contacted Tiedeman after coming across the Fletcher Group while researching recovery housing in other states, she said.
“I presented to [the commission] what we could do to assist,” Tiedeman said. “We don’t operate and we don’t fund. We’re more like coaches or cheerleaders, and because we have so much expertise in this area, we can point them toward resources or different types of funding.”
The Fletcher Group also conducted a cost-benefit analysis for a recovery campus project in Halifax. According to the concept proposal, this analysis estimates that the project would return $4.93 on every dollar invested over a 15-year period, and tens of thousands of dollars would be avoided in local health care and criminal justice costs.
People in recovery can work and pay taxes, they can reunite with their families and improve their mental health, lowering foster care and social services costs, Tiedeman said.
“Somebody that enters this program and is able to maintain their recovery for a year saves the community or state almost $75,000 a year,” Tideman said. “So there are financial benefits and individual benefits.”
‘A massive project’ and its goals
The conversation about a recovery campus began about three years ago, Cunningham said.
Along with the 30 or so other members of the Joint Commission on Recovery Housing, Cunningham has worked to spread the word about the project throughout the state.
Communities in Southside Virginia understand the need for this project, he said, and there’s been no formal opposition to the proposal.
Now that there’s community buy-in, the focus is on funding. The total construction cost for the project is estimated around $30 million, he said.
“We’re going to concentrate on getting funding from government programs that are designed for these types of projects,” Cunningham said. “We’ve also implemented a major capital campaign and we hope that a lot of our funding will come from that. Donors, philanthropic gifts, things like that.”
He hopes that the capital campaign will fund many of the operational costs after the campus is built. And nearby counties, which will likely send participants to the recovery campus, can commit to funding a certain number of beds, Cunningham said, which will also help pay operational costs.
He hopes to see construction start in 2027, which he called “a pretty aggressive schedule” for a project of this size.
“I’m not aware of a project of this magnitude anywhere else in Virginia,” he said.
The commission has identified a 50-acre site for the project and has agreed upon a purchase price with the landowner.
Construction will likely be done in two phases, with the first phase including a residential building with 100 beds to house 50 men and 50 women in two separate wings.
Southside Behavioral Health, a local mental health service, has agreed to serve as the operator of the recovery center.
Recovery court programs in Halifax and in other localities in the region will refer people to the recovery campus. Referrals will also come from the Department of Corrections, community behavioral health centers, the judicial system and from individuals referring themselves.
There will be an option for “step-up” housing, individual apartments for participants who are ready to live independently.
This first phase will also include the construction of a behavioral health outpatient building next to the residential facility, eliminating the transportation barriers that some recovery court participants face.
One of Cunningham’s current recovery court participants has gotten a steady job since he started the program, but he doesn’t have his own transportation. His boss takes him to and from recovery court each week, Cunningham said.
Like housing, lack of transportation can prevent a participant from succeeding in the program.
“We’ve got folks who live all over the county, and some of them live half an hour away from the courthouse,” Martin said. “If they don’t have reliable transportation, they won’t be able to fulfill the terms of recovery court because they have no way to get to our meetings that are in town, our community services.”
The recovery campus layout would fix this, she said.
“In recovery housing with automatic transportation, if it rolls out the way that Judge Cunningham plans, it would facilitate their recovery,” Martin said. “It makes access to those services easier and smoother and can better guarantee that they’ll get into active recovery.”
Phase two of construction would include developing a workforce training center. The center will offer skill-specific and pre-employment training to help participants prepare for meaningful employment, Cunningham said.
After years of talking about it, Cunningham said he’s excited to see the pieces start to come together.
“It’s important that we get this done as soon as we can. We are losing a lot of people in this community to drugs because they don’t have a place to stay,” he said. “There’s a relationship between hopelessness and drug use… . It became clear to me that we have to do something about it.”