RIGHTS-CANADA: Group ‘Fails’ Prisons for Handling of HIV/AIDS

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

OTTAWA, Dec 20 2002 (IPS) - Most Canadian prisons are failing to meet their legal obligations to establish measures to stem the spread of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C among inmates, a new report concludes.

‘Action on HIV/AIDS in Prisons: Too Little, Too Late, A Report Card’, by the Montreal-based Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, says a few federal, provincial and territorial correctional institutions are exceptions.

Unprotected sexual activity among male inmates and the sharing of unclean needles by inmates addicted to illicit drugs like heroin are providing the conditions for a serious epidemic within prison walls, said Ralf Jurgens, executive director for the Network.

But correctional officials and politicians in Ottawa and the provincial capitals are slow to adopt many of the recommended harm reduction measures, like providing condoms for safe sex, sterile syringes for drug addicts and bleach to clean needles, he told IPS.

”HIV has challenged society as a whole and the prison system is a closed environment, a system that finds change difficult. And it is a system that has traditionally been reluctant to acknowledge that some things happen in prison,” Jurgens said.

Others agree the system is still in denial about HIV/AIDS and sexual activity among males. ”If you incarcerate people for long periods of time, they will have sex,” said Anne Marie DiCenso, executive director of the Toronto-based Prisoners’ HIV/AIDS Support Action Network. ”It is human nature.”

How many Canadian inmates are HIV-positive, have hepatitis C, or in many cases have both, is difficult to say.

Some are reluctant to be tested voluntarily in prison, where confidentiality about medical matters is not well maintained and could be described as ”horrible”, said DiCenso.

She echoed findings of the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, which concluded that prison health workers in many jurisdictions are not properly trained in HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment.

”I have heard many nurses (in prison) say to me ‘we want training’ but they don’t get access to it,” said DiCenso.

Using federal government statistics, the Network estimates that known cases of HIV/AIDS increased by more than 35 percent in prisons in four years, while the rate of hepatitis C among inmates is 100 times greater than that of the general population.

A major victory for Canadian inmates is a decision last spring by Correctional Service Canada, the agency in charge of federal prisons, to permit all inmates to take methadone for their heroin addiction. Previously, the treatment was only available to those who had it prescribed by an outside doctor before their incarceration.

When prisoners challenged this provision in the courts, the officials relented because they had no legal case, said Jurgens. ”The prison system in the end didn’t even wait until a court pronounced itself on the issue.”

A recent Supreme Court of Canada decision that allows prisoners to vote in federal elections recognises that ”people don’t lose their human rights because they are incarcerated,” said DiCenso.

Nevertheless, inmates still fight many battles. One of DiCenso’s clients in a federal institution is currently suing Correctional Service Canada because he had been refused methadone treatment and subsequently became HIV-positive.

”He has been systematically harassed, removed into segregation and was not allowed to see his wife,” DiCenso said.

CSC spokesperson Francoise Bouchard said that inmates in federal jails have better access to condoms, bleach and methadone treatment.

She defended the system’s initial cautious approach to methadone because of the security challenges in making it available within a prison context. ”If a person is under treatment, he can be pressured into diverting his drugs to others,” Bouchard said.

Bouchard refused to comment on a recommendation by a federal task force in the late 1990s to permit the distribution of clean needles to addicts within the prisons.

The opposition to the idea comes from correctional officials and guards, said Glenn Betteridge, acting legal director of the HIV/AIDS Legal Clinic Ontario.

In all of the international studies of prison needle exchanges in Western and Eastern Europe, where they are more common, ”there has not been one instance of a needle being used as a weapon and that is always the position we hear from Correctional Service Canada, especially the correction officers,” Betteridge said.

Prisoners in the more liberal European systems are permitted to keep a clean syringe ”next to their toothbrush”, he added.

Within prison culture, noted Betteridge, there is an understanding that needle distribution is a positive programme, which ”you don’t want to jeopardise”.

Jurgens’s legal network gave the jails in the western province of British Columbia a B grade for their harm reduction efforts, beating out the federal prisons, which received only a B minus, while the province of Newfoundland and Labrador got a D.

Correctional institutions in the other provinces and territories in Canada had failing grades.

The eastern Arctic territory of Nunavut scored lowest. Paul Okalik, the premier of this almost entirely Inuit territory, said recently that condoms are not handed out in local jails because ”I haven’t heard of any same-sex relations to date.”