On March 25, Utah Governor Spencer Cox (R) signed a wide-ranging bill purportedly focused on the state’s criminal-legal statutes, but that also includes a line item prohibiting use of state funding to operate syringe service programs (SSP).
Utah authorized SSP in 2016, but has never directly funded them. While the dozen or so SSP currently operating within the state remain eligible for local and federal funding, this closes the door on state funding anywhere in the foreseeable future, through legislation that was otherwise unrelated.
SSP often have to find private donors to cover whatever costs fall outside the parameters of limited government funding. Federal funds, which are often made available to SSP through high-barrier grant applications, cannot be used to purchase syringes. The Utah SSP funding ban, along with most of the other provisions in the new law, will take effect September 1.
Most of HB 312, titled “Criminal Justice Amendments,” pertains to correctional housing. Jail overcrowding has been a growing crisis in Salt Lake County, which has not increased capacity at either of its two jails in almost 25 years, while the county population has grown by about 30 percent. A ballot initiative to add bed space failed in November 2024. In February, the Salt Lake City Council approved a 0.2 percent tax increase to cover an additional 248 beds, about half of what the ballot initiative would have added.
The new law addresses jail overcrowding, but not in the way that phrase is normally used. It prevents county sheriffs from releasing certain people based solely on lack of jail capacity. The premise is that these restrictions focus on violent charges, but they essentially target drug users.
The law also bans overcrowding-based release for anyone who’s been booked within the past 12 months.
One provision disqualifies overcrowding-based release for anyone “arrested for possession of any composition or mixture, including pills, that contains 100 grams or more of fentanyl or a fentanyl-related substance.”
This would seem to mean people arrested with 100-plus grams of something are still eligible for pre-trial release unless at least 100 grams of that something is pure fentanyl, or fentanyl analog. But establishing this would require quantification testing using gas chromatography–mass spectrometry at a forensics lab. Whereas for the the sheriff’s department to establish that someone was carrying 100-plus grams of something, at least some fraction of which was probably fentanyl, they just need a fentanyl test strip and a scale.
At a Salt Lake County Council meeting in February, an update from the sheriff’s department noted that out of approximately 29,000 annual bookings, there were about 4,000 releases forced by overcrowding. This number represents people who were being detained pre-trial and who were released from county jail on their own recognizance while they waited for their court dates, but media and legislators have pretty consistently referred to this as “inmates released early,” or putting “violent offenders back on the streets.”
The mischaracterization has been driven by legislation sponsor Karianne Lisonbee (R), who has repeatedly described the situation as if people never have to show up to court.
“Among those [4,000] were over 1,000 felonies that were released without ever seeing a judge,” Lisonbee reportedly said at a House Judiciary Committee meeting. “And then these people go out in the community and they commit more and more crimes.”
The law also bans overcrowding-based release for anyone who’s previously been booked into the same jail within the past 12 months, as well as anyone previously convicted of disqualifying charges, even if they were arrested for something unrelated.
The original version proposed in January drew public backlash for attempting to criminalize wearing face masks in public. A provision that would have made “intentional concealment of identity in a public gathering” a Class B misdemeanor included “wear[ing] a mask, or other facial obscurant or disguise … while congregating in a public place where other individuals are also masked, facially obscured or disguised.” It was ultimately removed from the bill.
Image via Wikimedia Commons/Creative Commons 3.0
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