We work to ensure that people held in South Carolina's detention centers receive the medical care, dignity, and civil liberties guaranteed to every person under law — and that families separated by incarceration have a path back to one another.
Family Inside and Out, Incorporated is a 501(c)(3) family-centered criminal justice reform organization dedicated to keeping families together — inside and out. We work to ensure that individuals held in detention centers receive the medical care, dignity, and basic civil liberties guaranteed under law, with a focus on mandating evidence-based medication-assisted treatment (MAT) in South Carolina detention facilities.
We also advocate for housing solutions that allow families affected by incarceration to remain intact during reentry. Our work is grounded in the conviction that people in need — incarcerated or free — deserve compassion, accountability, and care.
South Carolina detention centers routinely deny evidence-based medication-assisted treatment to people in their custody experiencing opioid withdrawal. The result is preventable suffering, preventable overdoses, and preventable deaths. We are working to mandate MAT availability in every South Carolina detention facility — because withdrawal in custody should not be a death sentence.
Incarceration tears families apart in ways that ripple for generations. We advocate for intact-family housing solutions during reentry, so that parents and children, partners and spouses, are not permanently separated by the consequences of a single arrest.
The basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution do not stop at a detention center door. We work to hold facilities accountable to the legal and ethical standards that already exist — and to close the gap between what the law promises and what people in custody actually receive.
In August 2025, Mary Brucato died at the Sheriff Al Cannon Detention Center in North Charleston, South Carolina. She was a mother. She was someone's daughter. She was a person in the custody of the state, and the state failed her.
Mary's case is not unique. Across South Carolina, people experiencing opioid withdrawal are held in detention centers without access to medications that the medical community — including the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, and the American Society of Addiction Medicine — has identified as the standard of care for opioid use disorder.
Family Inside and Out exists because the cost of inaction is measured in lives. We tell Mary's story, and the stories of others like her, because policy change requires names, faces, and consequences. We honor those we have lost by working to ensure no other family receives the call that the Brucatos did.
Read More About Our Work →Whether you are a family member, a community advocate, a clinician, a clergy member, an attorney, or simply someone who believes that detention centers should not kill the people they are entrusted to hold — there is a place for you here.