Page 4689 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 19 October 2011
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related crime and health issues. For example, I introduced a bill in the Assembly requiring a regime of mandatory drug-testing at the jail, drawing on experience from successful programs in New South Wales and the UK.
When all the strategies should be aimed at rehabilitation, providing needles and syringes to prisoners will simply help them to maintain their addiction until they are released. You cannot have an effective zero tolerance policy for drugs when you are at the same time issuing prisoners with drug-injecting implements. This is accepted across all other jurisdictions in Australia and across the English-speaking world. And calls for an NSP in jails have been rightly rejected by Labor and Liberal governments and oppositions in states and territories.
Advocates of drug liberalisation have recognised that in the ACT the Labor government and their Greens allies have a misguided ideological agenda that promotes prisoners’ rights above good prison management and effective drug reduction and treatment policies. As such, these advocate groups are pushing their agenda on the ACT that would result in the jail becoming a laboratory test case for their NSP agenda. However, the ACT is probably the worst jail in Australia to introduce a needle and syringe program because of the massive complexity arising from managing mixed populations of male, female, sentenced, remand, protected and non-protected prisoners.
The ACT jail has also been plagued by a litany of issues. Those issues have been documented well in this Assembly and I will not go through them again. But what I will highlight is that just recently we found out that there are 41 prisoners that are essentially being denied hep C treatment because they are waiting for evaluation or they are waiting for treatment because of a shortage of places at the Alexander Maconochie Centre.
Last sitting week I raised the case of a prisoner who was able to store methadone in a juice bottle, with the intention of self-harm, but the methadone that he had been storing was then accidentally given to another prisoner, leading to that prisoner having an overdose. And in that setting you want to introduce a needle and syringe program!
The advocates of a needle and syringe program often cite the high prevalence of hep C as a reason that an NSP is needed. But the reality is that although the prevalence of hep C is high, every single case at the Alexander Maconochie Centre was contracted outside the jail. In fact, not a single case of hep C has been contracted at the jail and according to academic research, transmission of hep C is actually higher outside jails than inside for prisoners where access to drugs in jails is limited. And I will gladly provide members with a copy of that academic paper.
The corrections staff are also opposed to a needle and syringe program. As well as concerns about the negative impact of a needle and syringe program on drug programs, prison staff have expressed safety concerns about the prisoners being armed with needles which can be used as weapons against themselves and other prisoners. And their argument is legitimate. A Canberra woman was recently jailed for seven years for a series of robberies where she used blood-filled syringes to threaten shop and security staff.
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