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Philadelphia has expanded its controversial Neighborhood Wellness Court program, in which police arrest unhoused opioid users for minor offenses as a way to pressure them to accept treatment and social services.
The court launched in January 2025 as part of Mayor Cherelle Parker’s broader effort to establish a wellness “ecosystem” for opioid users and reduce street homelessness and drug trafficking in Kensington, where an open-air drug market has operated for decades.
In the program’s first year, police arrested people for Wellness Court on Wednesday mornings. In March they added a second day and in May a third, court director Eleni Belisonzi said. Arrests now happen Tuesdays through Thursdays.
Police bring those detained to the Kensington Wellness Support Center, where they undergo health checks and can immediately go before a judge. Some with serious health issues are hospitalized, and many are diverted to a variety of other legal assistance and treatment programs that operate out of the Lehigh Avenue building or other locations.
Starting next month the city plans to have a judge present on Mondays and Fridays for check-in meetings with people who were charged previously, and sometime later this year police are expected to begin conducting morning arrests five days a week.
The city is spending $3 million a year to operate the Wellness Court, Belisonzi said. But health providers, harm reduction activists, Chief Defender Keisha Hudson and District Attorney Larry Krasner have criticized the program, saying it’s unethical and ineffective to use the threat of prosecution to force people into drug treatment.
Meanwhile, Belisonzi and other officials with the Office of Public Safety, which runs the court, argue that the program helps people rather than punishing them.
“The penalty for pleading guilty or for being found guilty is not jail, it is a fine. So we are not jailing people because they don’t want treatment,” she said. “We are trying to strongly suggest to people that they go to treatment and trying to really work to set up the best path to treatment, so that they can be successful.”
Hundreds of arrests, a few program completions
Hudson and Krasner had criticized the Parker administration for not bringing them in from the start to help design the program, and Hudson pointed to the apparently low completion rate for participants.
That number remains low, but administration officials argue it masks broader success.
In the first nine months of the program, though last October, 217 people were arrested, 72 accepted the treatment option, and 10 completed the program, one of whom later died of a drug overdose, Hudson said last year.
She said many people agreed to participate as a way to avoid prosecution, but then failed to show up for subsequent court dates or in some cases jumped out of vehicles taking them to treatment centers.
According to new data from the Office of Public Safety, in the first five months of 2026, 315 people were arrested, 273 were offered some type of service, 159 were deemed eligible for Wellness Court, and 132 agreed to participate.
Of those, more then half had to go the hospital or in-patient care first, leaving 61 who formally enrolled in the court program. Thirteen of them have completed it so far, meaning a judge agreed that they had completed an ordered course of drug treatment or other services, said Jennifer Crandall, a spokesperson for the Office of Public Safety.
She said 42 of those arrested could not participate because they had active warrants that could not be cleared quickly and were jailed. Another 114 went to other programs, like the Police-assisted Diversion Program (PAD), the Accelerated Misdemeanor Program, or Treatment Court.
Crandall said the actual completion rate “has risen substantially” compared to last year, and said more than half of those arrested have returned for services of some kind at the Kensington Wellness Support Center.
Sixty percent of those taken directly to in-patient treatment stayed in treatment, and then in most cases moved onto longer-term residential programs like the city’s Riverview Wellness Village in Northeast Philadelphia.
“Success cannot be measured in completions alone,” Crandall said. “Everyone we touch receives some form of care, including food and a basic medical screening. Hundreds of people have avoided jail due to our warrant clearance program.”
“Many people who never formally complete the program at least start their path to recovery with NWC. The path to recovery is rarely straight or easy,” she said.
Public defenders playing a bigger role
Another change is greater involvement by attorneys from the Defenders Association.
Initially, all of the people arrested and brought into Wellness Court were represented by an attorney hired by the city. Public defenders only worked to clear bench warrants from old arrests, a critical step that allows people to enter court-supervised treatment and other programs.
More recently, however, defenders have also been representing their pre-existing clients when they are newly arrested and brought to the courtroom, Belisonzi said.
“There’s two public defenders out here every single day, and we’re really appreciative of all their help, and all the care they give to their clients, and all the advocacy they do on behalf of them,” she said.
In a brief interview, first assistant defender Sarah Allan said her office also now participates in Wellness Court planning meetings run by the Office of Public Safety. Asked about the past criticism of the practice of arresting people to get them into treatment, she said, “I think they’ve worked out a lot of the wrinkles on that. I feel like that’s smoothing out.”
The Defenders Association declined to comment further on its position or on the new data on program participation rates.
Lozada: “I was harsh” on behalf of residents
Allan was attending a ribbon-cutting ceremony held at the Kensington Wellness Support Center on Monday to mark the recent construction of a new courtroom there. The Wellness Court had previously operated out of the 24th/25th Police District building on Whitaker Avenue.
During the event, Mayor Parker said the defenders have played an essential role in making the court possible, and she praised the police, the judiciary, her Office of Public Safety and numerous other officials and organizations that have worked to implement her Kensington strategy.
The other speakers included City Councilmember Quetcy Lozada, who has spearheaded controversial measures affecting the neighborhood, including a business curfew and restrictions on the operations of mobile van services that provide food and healthcare to people living on the street.
Lozada thanked the mayor and others for their efforts to tamp down Kensington’s drug market, and apologized for the intensity of her advocacy for a rigorous response, saying she was working on behalf of residents who have lived for years amid the squalor of the drug market.
“I was harsh and I recognize that. I was harsh because all of them put me here, because for years they stood up… and they said, ‘we need, we deserve, we can’t live, we are suffocating,’ and no one listened,” she said. “So when we say we are thankful, we are thankful.”
