Prison health now: Needle and syringe programs in Canada’s prisons

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Prison health now: Needle and syringe programs in Canada’s prisons

13 May 2015

On April 30, the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network co-hosted an ancillary event on this topic at the Annual Canadian Conference on HIV/AIDS Research (CAHR), along with theCanadian Aboriginal AIDS Network (CAAN), Native Youth Sexual Health Network, Prisoners with HIV/AIDS Support Action Network (PASAN), and Ryerson University’s Department of Criminology.

There’s a public health emergency in Canada’s federal prison system. In prison, the estimated prevalence rates of HIV and hepatitis C (HCV) are considerably higher than in the general population. Why is this the case?

A key contributing factor is the sharing of equipment to inject drugs, as sterile needles and syringes are currently not made available to prisoners who need them. Specific communities, in particular Indigenous people who are living with the ongoing effects of colonialism and are disproportionately incarcerated in Canada, are particularly affected by this pressing public health and human rights issue.

Prison needle and syringe programs (PNSPs) have been successful in addressing the negative public health consequences of injection drug use in prisons in other countries so far, so why does Canada continue to neglect an already vulnerable population – denying them access to harm reduction services?

The goals of this ancillary event were to share practice-based evidence on the current state of federal prisons as well as international data on the proven effectiveness of PNSPs, and to generate feedback with respect to a “sign-on” statement that will be used as an advocacy tool to garner broader support for PNSPs in Canada.

Click here to read the full article.

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