For women leaving New Hampshire’s jails with a substance use disorder and nowhere stable to land, the gap between release and recovery is often where everything falls apart. Dismas Home of New Hampshire has spent years trying to close that gap in Manchester, and this week it planted a second flag. A ribbon-cutting ceremony and tours on Tuesday morning marked the opening of a new recovery home in Rochester, a milestone that, according to New Hampshire Public Radio, will soon give the organization 28 beds across the two cities.
The expansion reflects a deliberate, county-by-county vision. Cheryll Andrews, executive director of Dismas Home of New Hampshire, said the goal is to one day place a home in every county in the state. The mission is personal for the organization’s founder. “Our founder, Julie McCarthy Brown wants a home in every county before she passes away,” Andrews said. The Rochester location moves that map one step closer, extending the model into Strafford County and the broader Seacoast region, where demand for long-term recovery beds has consistently outpaced supply.
What sets Dismas Home apart is the population it serves and the length of time it commits to each resident. The organization works specifically with women who have been involved with the criminal justice system, offering evidence-based substance use treatment alongside the practical scaffolding of independent living. Women who enter the program can stay up to 15 months, a far longer runway than many short-term treatment facilities provide. The homes are staffed around the clock and offer mental, behavioral, and physical health support, recognizing that recovery rarely follows a straight line and that stability takes time to build.
Andrews said there is already a waitlist for the Rochester home. Referrals come from court systems, county and state jails, and defense attorneys, and prospective residents must complete an application and a vetting process before they are accepted. The program also fills a specific niche in the state’s patchwork of recovery services. Some facilities work only with women who have children with them. Dismas Home takes a different approach, accepting women who do not have children or who are not currently with them. “We don’t serve women with children, we serve women who want them back,” Andrews said, a line that captures how the program frames recovery as a path toward rebuilding family ties rather than a precondition for help.
The numbers Andrews cited point to why the model has drawn support. She said about 67 percent of the women who enter the program complete it, and that 90 percent of those who finish stay sober for the long term. For a population that often cycles repeatedly through incarceration and relapse, those completion and retention figures represent a meaningful break in the pattern, and they help explain why courts and jails continue to send referrals.
The human stakes behind those statistics come through in the story of Alacia Linville, who graduated from Dismas Home’s Manchester program. Linville was homeless when she went to jail in Belknap County in 2019. She had been incarcerated before for short stretches, but this time she was in for eight months for the sale of methamphetamine. About three months in, she began thinking she needed an aftercare plan. “I had gone to treatments numerous times and none of them had worked,” she said. A case manager referred her to Dismas Home in Manchester, where she ended up staying more than 15 months starting in 2020.
Linville was hesitant at first. Manchester was the city where she had been using, she had never tried an aftercare program, and she expected the arrangement to feel transactional. What she found instead, she said, was a different kind of support. “I was used to going into programs, getting the support, getting out, I was homeless again,” she said. This time the support held. After her time at Dismas Home, she moved to Hampton and stayed at Magnolia House while she addressed other charges from Rockingham court, and she said Dismas Home helped her navigate those proceedings. She has been sober since 2023 and traces the start of her recovery to 2019. It was about a year into her sobriety, she said, that she felt certain she could keep going. She now lives in Newmarket with her 2-year-old daughter, Jocelyn, and her fiance. “I look at my family today and I just can’t imagine, like ever moving backwards,” she said.
The Rochester home is not yet operational. Dismas Home expects to begin housing women there in early August. Before that can happen, the home still needs to be licensed, furnishings need to be placed, and some construction remains underway. Once those final steps are complete, the new beds will begin chipping away at a waitlist that already exists, a sign of how acute the need remains across the region.
The expansion arrives against a backdrop of intense attention to New Hampshire’s substance use crisis and the resources available to fight it. State and federal officials have continued to push major funding initiatives, including the reintroduced $65 billion federal opioid response plan from Senators Shaheen and Hassan, while debates over treatment access play out at the local level, as seen in the controversy surrounding a proposed methadone clinic. Long-term recovery housing like Dismas Home occupies a distinct space in that landscape, focused less on the acute medical phase of treatment and more on the slow work of helping women rebuild lives after the justice system and addiction have taken them apart. The broader strain on New Hampshire’s health infrastructure, including rural services facing federal funding pressure, is explored further in our coverage of Dartmouth Health’s rural grant amid Medicaid cuts.
For Andrews and the Dismas Home team, the Rochester ribbon-cutting is both a celebration and a marker of how far the vision still has to travel. Twenty-eight beds across two cities is a real expansion, but it is a small fraction of the statewide footprint the organization hopes to build, one county at a time, in the years ahead.
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