“We’re fixing to do something that I’m never going to do again on this tour. This is going to be the only time this might ever happen in my career, actually,” Jelly Roll told the University of Virginia’s John Paul Jones Arena last year, one day before Halloween. He had packed out the 14,000-capacity venue on his Beautifully Broken tour, the show a late addition to a buzzing trek that stopped at Madison Square Garden, too. A former drug dealer and recovering addict, Jelly Roll was having the biggest year of his life. By the age of 40, he’d been arrested around 40 times and as a teen, jailed for aggravated robbery. But that night in Charlottesville, he was on top of the world as he introduced his fervent fans to four men he’d gotten out of jail for a few hours. They were coming on stage to sing with him.
Jelly Roll had made a routine of visiting jails as he toured, and earlier that day, he spent an hour and a half at the Chesterfield County Jail, just outside Richmond. In particular, he spent it with 100 men and women of the jail’s HARP program—Helping Addicts Recover Progressively, established in 2016. “Today I had the most unique experience I’ve ever had in a jail,” he explained, touting that HARP is “teaching people how to recover the right way, through therapy and through music, through redemption and giving them real second chances.” So, after his visit, he continued, he called Sheriff Karl Leonard, who runs and founded the program, and asked if the four men who performed for him during his visit could perform with him in Charlottesville – so that they could see that the life he earned in recovery could come to them, too. “Craig, Ejay, Kevin, and Amin – up here right now!” he beckoned, finally. “Y’all get on up here baby, come see your town!”
The men jogged into place. Amin, whose HARP brothers call him Cali, a play on his Los Angeles hometown, stood closest to Jelly. He pumped his microphoned fist in the air, a lyric sheet dangling in the other hand. Craig, to his left, flexed one arm. Ejay shook his raised mic like dice. Kevin, with a dark acoustic guitar strapped to his chest, shook his head and bowed. “If anyone believes in second chances, it’s fucking Jelly Roll show, right?” the star bellowed to the raucous crowd. And with that, they began their own remix of Jelly Roll’s “Unpretty,” a then-three-week-old song about the twelve steps of addiction recovery feeling miles away. Ejay and Craig had written their own rap verses to it.
Though their show was stunning, Sheriff Leonard was prepared for them to blow it in the arena. After all, they’d only known they’d be performing for a few hours and only learned what they’d be performing minutes before. “For them to have failed would have been perfectly acceptable,” Sheriff Leonard told me. “How ill-prepared can you be?”
But Ejay’s original verse was steady and powerful. Though his hands and voice shook as he sang, he grew more confident and his vibrato more glorious with each repetition. And Craig, who’d kept his cool all day, absolutely exploded. “Living life in the fast lane, chasing my dreams/Or at least I thought I was, but I couldn’t stay green/Drinking heavily, the bottle got control of my mind/Thinking I’m something that I’m not/Getting worser with time,” he roared towards Ejay, who fed him more energy. “Tryna find a new way to live/I wanna be free/Then I heard that this program was something I need,” he said, feverishly tugging on the HARP t-shirt he wore.
Jelly with Amin, Ejay, Craig, and Kevin on stage.
Courtesy of Chesterfield County Jail HARP Program
“I had a moment on the stage,” Craig tells me the next month at Chesterfield County Jail, now in his gray uniform instead of the navy HARP tee and crisp jeans he wore that night. He had always rapped, and for a while on the outside, between a 13-year stint in prison and his current bid, he ran a small record label of men who couldn’t stay out of the streets either. “[What] I kept bottled in, it came out while I was rapping. It was a line I said, ‘Chasing my dreams.’ It hit me like a punch in the chest,” he says. “I let the world know, ‘This is me. This is where I’m supposed to be.”
The day after Thanksgiving, I’m sitting with Sheriff Leonard and Kerri Rhodes in her office, not far from the separate pods that HARP participants live in, tucked away from the general population. The grey walls of cement bricks are lined with photos of her loved ones inside the jail and out. As they describe HARP’s origins and workflow, they build on each other’s sentences with the drive and synchronicity of a doubles team in a tennis match. In one moment, Rhodes pulled down a neatly framed collage of pictures from the Jelly Roll concert for me to see and smiled. In 2021, she became the director of mental health at the jail and the lead counselor for HARP. In 2019, she lost her own 20-year-old son, Taylor, to an accidental overdose of heroin laced with fentanyl. “15 and a half, shoulder injury, bottle of Percocet,” she says, marking the beginning of the end.
Now, she proudly runs a TikTok account—HARPTOK—documenting the participants as they meditate, read, craft, and write their way out of addiction. As one of HARPTOK’s more than 18,000 followers, Jelly Roll was drawn to two of the inmates’ therapies, Rhodes and Leonard tell me. First was their tapping, a surprising physical technique for coping with trauma and subduing the kinds of painful emotions that can lead to the type of dangerous decisions that land people in jail. Rhodes discovered tapping in her own healing before it revolutionized her work with others. Then, there was their singing. In August 2023, they invited Jelly Roll to stop by with a rendition of one of his most popular songs, “I Need a Favor.” “You know who your viewership is?” Leonard remembers Jelly Roll telling them. “It’s me and my crew.”
Sheriff Leonard and Kerri Rhodes with Ejay, Amin, Kevin, and Craig (Right to left, counter clockwise)
Courtesy of Chesterfield County Jail HARP Program
Karl Leonard, tall and stocky, with a small tattoo of a star under his left thumb, created HARP in 2016, two years into his tenure as Sheriff. He got the job at the onset of the heroin epidemic that ravaged the nation and hit Chesterfield hard. “We were seeing 25 to 30 new people arrested every day with heroin addiction,” he says. “I’m a jail. I’m not equipped to be a recovery center.” After 31 years of making those very arrests as a police officer, Leonard was finally seeing the reality of why. “One of the things you learn that you don’t learn on the street as a police officer is the human condition,” he admits. “Quickly, when you start talking to folks here and learning about them…now there’s truly bad people who need to be away for the rest of their life, but that’s not the majority of people incarcerated today. There’s a lot of really good people who, but for the circumstances of their life, ended up in jail, where I didn’t. A lot of these folks never had a chance.”
Then, once the addicts ended up in jail, forced sobriety made them more susceptible to overdose when they used next. In March 2016, when the 10th resident of Chesterfield that year had been killed by heroin, Leonard decided the jail needed to become some sort of recovery center by any means necessary. “We didn’t have a blueprint, we didn’t have a budget, we didn’t have staff, we didn’t even know what a recovery program is. But I just knew we had to do something to change that cycle. In fact, one of [HARP’s] taglines is ‘breaking the cycle of recidivism by breaking the cycle of addiction.’”
Leonard could spot the addicts easily—they were the ones curled up on the cold jail floor to soothe their withdrawal symptoms—and invited them to join. “We just started throwing stuff at the wall. Quite honestly, eight years later, we’re still throwing stuff at the wall. The pathway to long-term recovery is a crazy map. Not everybody’s going to follow the same route.” What they’ve uncovered so far seems to be working—a 2019 study by Virginia Commonwealth University found 90 HARP graduates to only have a 28 percent recidivism rate compared to the national average of 68 percent. Even among those who didn’t graduate, the recidivism rate was 55 percent. “HARP transforms lives. The program has given so many participants the opportunity to reinvent themselves,” says Dr. Amy Cook, a professor of criminal justice at VCU’s L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, who led the study. “At the core of its success is Sheriff Leonard and his staff’s innovative approach. [They’re] committed to addressing trauma and other adverse childhood experiences, medical needs, building recovery capital and social networks, provide housing, employment, and other reentry needs upon release from jail. I interviewed countless HARP participants as well as their family members. All of them remarked about HARP being different from other programs because of Sheriff Leonard’s ability to connect, show fairness and respect.”
Kerri Rhodes knew, professionally and personally, that the path to addiction often starts with trauma and that there are too few resources to curb both. Even as a therapist herself, with 28 years of clinical experience and connections to all manners of providers, judges, and police officers, she could not keep her son Taylor alive. “When we lost him, my trauma was so great that traditional therapy—this think-and-talk-your-way-out-of-trauma—was ridiculous. I was like, ‘I can’t function.’ And so, I started to look for other tools and came across tapping.”
Through trial and research, Rhodes found relief by using her fingers to tap the same sites that acupuncture targets to balance energy in the body, like the top of the head or the chin. When people are feeling anxious, scared, or angry, the principles of tapping theorize that the practice calms the amygdala, the part of the brain that controls those emotions. They can be triggered by trauma, and “Trauma is the absence of safety,” says Rhodes.
As she and the HARP participants tap, they repeat empowering mantras; sometimes, the inmates write them themselves. In one TikTok, part of their Tapping Tuesday series where they display the technique, one member named Josh leads Ejay and their HAPR brother Ernest—the participants think of each other as siblings—in a meditation he created called “The Power of Growth.” “I see that I am only human,” he says lovingly as they all tap the side of their right hands with their left fingertips. “Not perfect, but perfectly imperfect,” he adds, guiding them to tap between their eyebrows.
Tapping, along with another process of softly stroking the arms, face, or hands called havening, can re-associate traumatic memories and responses with the sensation of safety that wasn’t there before. Rhodes couldn’t believe how quickly it helped her cope. She became certified to teach it around the time she had taken up substance abuse treatment advocacy. She remembers how her son, hopeful that he would recover, told her that when he got to the other side of his addiction, they’d help improve the ecosystem of services around it. “I didn’t realize that the other side of it meant that he was really going to be on the other side of it,” she says.
Leonard and Rhodes began to cross paths on an opioid task force in central Virginia, both stunned when local leaders would pat themselves on the back while a crisis raged. In 2021, After reading an article of Rhodes’ in a Richmond magazine that tackled the stigma of addiction, Leonard invited her to speak to the HARP participants in the jail. She was nervous, having never been to one, but quickly found community as she described Taylor’s death. “They sob, I sob, they put me back together,” she says. “Two days later, I email and I say, ‘Hey, I’d like to start volunteering my clinical skills here.’ I do, and then I never leave.” She specializes as a trauma therapist in HARP, teaching tapping and other creative means of coping. “We do educate people about addiction because I want them to understand what happens in their brain, but we really spend a lot of time going to the core issues that drive the addiction, which for everybody in this jail is trauma. Everybody’s in survival when they come in,” she explains. Conversely: “Nobody’s in survival when they’re creating.”
“I think where a lot of programs don’t cut the mustard is where they focus on the drugs and the alcohol. Drugs and alcohol aren’t the problem,” says Leonard, who tells me all four of the men who performed with Jelly Roll are booked on charges attributed to their drug use. “It’s their solution,” Rhodes offers. So, in addition to unique trauma-centered therapies, HARP also empowers its peers—Rhodes and Leonard rarely call them inmates—to be the arbiters of their own healing by running many aspects of the program autonomously. “They decide who comes in,” Rhodes explains. No one can be mandated to join HARP by a lawyer or judge, and there is no time off offered for participating. Successful HARP members can rise up to the rank of mentor and assistant mentor, who then assess new candidates for acceptance – and removal. They’ve established 48 rules for the male participants and 52 rules for the women. “They set up their rules, they enforce the rules. If they say, ‘We want Cali to be moved,’ I don’t ask any questions. ‘Cali, pick up your stuff. You’re gone,’” says Leonard. “We’re the guardrails,” Rhodes adds. “We just make sure it all stays on the track.’”
Jelly Roll visits Chesterfield County Jail’s HARP program Wed. Oct. 30, 2024.
Mark Gormus/CHESTERFIELD COUNTY
HARP takes real risks: family members, who could sneak in contraband, are frequently incorporated to mend broken bonds and strengthen the participants’ support systems upon release. HARP mentors receive free training as certified peer recovery specialists who local governments can employ to accompany first responders on drug-related calls; Leonard’s department has hired seven graduates. And once a HARP member finishes their sentence, they’re still encouraged to use the jail’s psychiatric services. “We start our work with you in earnest after release,” says Leonard. “We maintain connection with you for years.”
Anyone in the community, not just those under arrest or detained, can check into jail at any time to use their resources and get guidance navigating the services that are available on the outside. Through HARP, Leonard and Rhodes are radically rethinking addiction, incarceration, and the social isolation that comes with both. Through his music, Jelly Roll has been doing the same.
The day of the Charlottesville concert actually marked Jelly Roll’s second visit to Chesterfield County Jail. He had stopped by once before, in August 2023, after direct messaging with Rhodes through HARPTOK. “He came with an entourage,” Leonard says. “He bought us tons of guitars and stuff. Well, the first thing. He walks in the door and says, ‘Who’s this crazy tapping lady?’” Despite requiring vocal rest ahead of a show at Virginia Beach, Jelly sang “Save Me” with all of them.
Amin, the HARP quartet’s lead singer, wasn’t there. He’d first come to Chesterfield in 2022.. “I’ve always kind of just been stagnant,” says Amin. “Been locked up, getting tattoos on my face, I can’t get jobs that I want.”
Amin first joined HARP when he arrived at Chesterfield County Jail, but after 30 days in the program, he finished his sentence. His HARP brothers feared he didn’t have the tools to beat his addiction on the outside. He had even snuck drugs into the jail. They pleaded that he stay active with the program. Rhodes and Amin did keep in touch, but after a two-week stint at a recovery house, he eventually relapsed and was back on the street, living out of a friend’s barbershop. Before long, there was a new warrant out for his arrest for violating probation.
Amin wanted help, and even to turn himself back in, Rhodes says he told her over and over, but he feared withdrawal, even though the jail had new medically assisted treatments to help him manage it. “It’s just such a terrible feeling,” Amin says. “I can’t even explain it.” Rhodes and Amin say that Rhodes encouraged Amin to seek help at a recovery center, if not through rearrest. When Amin was ready to get sober, he says, he struck a deal with Rhodes to detox in a recovery residence before going back to jail.
However, Amin didn’t know it couldn’t work that way, and no one told him. “We set him up with this recovery home he wanted to go to,” says Leonard. “But legally, when we know there is an active warrant out for somebody, and we know where they are, we are obligated to serve it.” The Sheriff had officers bring Amin back to jail through an arrest. I later mentioned to Leonard and Rhodes how difficult it is to hear that they encouraged Amin to make choices that would land him back in jail before he was ready. Leonard insists that Amin’s rearrest was an unpopular decision in the office. “You hear this thing probably over the country,” the sheriff says. “‘We can’t arrest our way out of this epidemic.’” I truly believe we have to arrest our way out of it,” he says instead, emphasizing a dearth of resources outside of the jail.
When Amin was forced back to Chesterfield, he was—naturally—pissed, says Rhodes. She and a peer recovery specialist who had been working with Amin met him there. “I’m like, ‘I can live with you being mad, and you’re alive,’” Rhodes recalls. “I can’t live with anything happening to you. This is not the way we wanted it to happen.’ And he looks up, and he goes, ‘Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I love both of you. I know this is going to save my life.’”
Amin had been in HARP for seven months when Jelly Roll came back. The staff had learned that Amin was a talented musician—a self-taught singer, drummer, and pianist who could replay anything he heard. Yet, painfully introverted, his first time singing for an audience was just two months before. “We believe in making people uncomfortable, taking them out of their comfort zone because that’s their ability to deal with uncomfortable feelings,” says Rhodes, who had asked Amin to perform for HARP. “He doesn’t like the spotlight, but he’s meant for it. I think a lot of his drug use and what’s happened to him has been because of that inability to feel and be uncomfortable. I like pushing them in a safe way—‘We got you. This can’t go wrong.’”
Rhodes knew Jelly would be stopping in nearby Charlottesville and invited him to return. Though his team didn’t confirm their visit until the night before, the HARP quartet prepared their show for him. Rhodes brought his Beautifully Broken CD in, and they tinkered with what they could play themselves. Ejay wrote his rap verse to “Unpretty” after overhearing Amin singing it. He had only restarted rapping in jail. When he was a kid, his mother found a book of his raps and poetry and discouraged him from it, worried he wouldn’t continue playing football and go to college.
“I just felt like it was the perfect time for me to thank God,” Ejay says of the verse he tore through on stage in Charlottesville. “This is my second time in the program, and I died twice on this last run,” he adds, recounting two overdoses on the outside. “I just put God before everything. It’s three things. God, recovery, then self. I just wanted to take time to let Him know what my plans were and let Him know that I understood what I’m supposed to do. It took me probably two minutes because it’s not hard to tell the truth.”
Kevin plays guitar for Jelly Roll as he visits Chesterfield County Jail’s HARP program Wed. Oct. 30, 2024.
Mark Gormus/CHESTERFIELD COUNTY
“One of the things you need to know about Corrections,” Leonard tells me, “For security reasons, we never announce visitors. So they didn’t know Jelly was coming until Jelly walked through the door.” This time, he nestled in among the HARP family as different members performed for him. “He was a giddy high school kid, sitting in a concert himself,” says Leonard. He FaceTimed his wife, podcaster Bunnie XO, who has struggled with substance abuse as well. He sang his hit “I’m Not Okay” along with them; he cried a lot. People like Amin, Ejay, Craig, and Kevin are the people that Jelly Roll’s music is meant for. “I like all the songs,” says Amin, who sang about five of them to and with him. “I could relate to a lot of his songs; [the] struggle and the pain.”
Jelly Roll left Chesterfield around 4 p.m. on October 30, but Chesterfield did not leave him. “He’s on 64 driving to Charlottesville, and he calls me and says, ‘I got this crazy idea, Sheriff, how about bringing Cali and those other three guys up to Charlottesville so they can perform?’” says Leonard. Gears turning, he asked the singer when they’d need to get there and learned they had two and a half hours to make it to the arena, which was already an hour and a half away. He decided they could do it. The HARP quartet had been lounging in t-shirts and underwear with their brothers when Leonard and Rhodes broke the news. “We were just stuck,” says Amin. “We didn’t know what to say. Like, we’re in jail. Who does this shit?”
“Cali dropped to his knees,” Ejay says of Amin, who up to then had never even been to a concert before. “I’ve done so much time,” Amin says. “I used to think about this shit. I used to lay in my bed, just picturing myself on stage.” Then he realized he needed a shower, a haircut, and, most importantly, clothes. “We had literally had an hour,” says Leonard. “We went and got their clothes from when they were arrested; none of them fit. We had to send people to Walmart.” They managed to freshen up, get HARP t-shirts from their non-profit in Richmond, and wear the sneakers—Nikes, Vans—that they had gotten booked in. Amin wore the same classic black-and-white Vans in Rhodes’ office. After jumping through a series of hoops, they were on the road. “I rode in the car with them, had the four of them in the back,” Leonard says. “It was like when you ride with your kids, and they have these conversations in the back, and they think you don’t hear them. They were so high.” This high, Amin told them, was better than any he’d ever gotten from drugs.
They were treated like VIPs on arrival, with a green room near Shaboozey’s, one of the night’s openers. Since the men weren’t sure what they’d be asked to sing, Rhodes printed out lyrics to all the songs they’d practiced and passed them out in preparation. In just a t-shirt and shorts himself, Jelly Roll made his way to their room to go over the setlist, popping in and out until he took the stage. Soon, it was their turn. There had been a mix of nerves and shock among them but also a sense of power. “When we finally get there, we’re walking through the back, and we got a glimpse of all the people there,” says Craig. I’m like, ‘Yeah, we’re ready to shut this joint down.’ That’s all I’m telling them.’”
Everyone—from the audience, to Shaboozey, to Jelly Roll’s own band—was blown away, says Leonard. Jelly Roll’s drummer gave them each a signed drum stick. “I remember the band was like, ‘We don’t cry. We cried when they sang,’” says Rhodes. Backstage, Amin confided in Jelly Roll about a largely unmemorable mistake he says he made while singing. “I was like, ‘Hey man, I’m so sorry I messed up,’” says Amin. “He was like, ‘Don’t be sorry, it sounded perfect.’”
Shaboozey visits the singers in Chesterfield County Jail’s HARP program backstage.
Kerri Rhodes/Chesterfield County
Before I leave Chesterfield County Jail, the men, Leonard and Rhodes, walk me through their pods by way of the multipurpose space they call the bridge room, where Jelly Roll’s “Anything is Possible” is printed on the door to their living quarters. Their dozens of HARP brothers are spending time together on the lower floor. Stairs lead to their cells above, and around the perimeter of the room are portraits of HARP men who have died. On another wall is a large photo of Rhodes and her son Taylor. The women’s pod is slightly neater but similar, with a large dry-erase board covered with encouraging messages to each other: You are a queen, one reads. A woman named Ashley, in a dainty voice, tells me what the quartet’s performance meant to her. “In active addiction, we lose our dreams,” she says. “And after we lose our dreams, we forget what we love or what we want to do when we grow up. To watch them live out their dreams it just made us dream again.”
Ejay now writes every day. Kevin, who graduated from Virginia Commonwealth University decades ago, where he used heavily as a working musician, now thinks music can help break his cycle of addiction instead of fueling it. “I was playing out in open mic nights,” he recalls. “I was getting to the point where I could make a little money just singing, doing little country songs and stuff. It would lead back to using every time. Using something to feel comfortable in front of people.”
“HARP lit the fire in me,” Kevin says. “And Jelly Roll giving us that opportunity, it just opened my eyes to the possibilities if I keep my recovery first.I know that the second I don’t make recovery my main focus, all of those possibilities go away.”
Leonard and Rhodes are doing what they can to make recovery possible in a criminal justice system that’s overwhelmingly hostile to it. “The one thing I learned in 200 years of corrections is we failed,” he says. “We failed miserably. There’s been no rehabilitation going on. My older deputies have been conditioned to say, ‘Lock them up, throw the key away. You’re a bad person.’” They’ve been bolstered by younger deputies who believe in something new, he explains. HARP has been met with fervent resistance and little funding along the way, Leonard and Rhodes say, though the program has been reported to have saved taxpayers almost 20.8 million dollars in its first three years. It has the potential to save even more money by emptying prisons and jails through real recovery.
“We’re talking to inmates now. We call them by their first name. I don’t even know their inmate numbers. We have a relationship with them; we sit with them, and we talk to them. We cry with them quite often,” Leonard says. “People continue to die because the rules were made for confinement in the 1920s. They don’t reflect what we need to do today.”
