Justice Action has been engaged in the area of reducing the risk of blood-borne diseases in prisons for well over 20 years, most recently advocating for Needle and Syringe Programs (NSPs) in a submission to the ACT Legislative Assembly’s Inquiry into the Drugs of Dependence (Personal Use) Amendment Bill 2021 and challenging the refusal of making NSPs accessible to prisoners in NSW in 2019.
In the submission to the ACT Inquiry, Justice Action highlights that a significant amount of Australian prisoners (25%) use unsafe furtive methods of drug injection and highlights successful outcomes in the implementation of NSPs in other countries such as Germany. In the legal challenge to NSW’s lack of implementation of NSPs, Justice Action argued that prisons have a duty of care to prevent unsafe methods of drug usage within their premises, and that NSW’s lack of action on this front could be a negligent breach of this duty.
Much earlier, in 1996, Justice Action initiated ex-prisoner Richard Lynott’s case against the government for negligence due to their failure to supply clean needles and syringes in prison.
Justice Action had also held membership of the Blood Borne Communicable Diseases group at ACON, a community organisation aiming to improve community health and HIV responses for diverse genders and sexualities, for 10 years.
Justice Action represented Australian prisoners to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Health in 2009 and was one of the founding members of the NSW Justice Health Consumer and Community Group.
Justice Action has also made publications such as the Just Us newspaper, which is distributed to Australian and New Zealand prisoners, covering HCV issues on the front cover, detailing its transmission amongst vulnerable communities such as prisoners as well as successes in harm minimisation programs such as NSPs overseas.
In 2011, Justice Action was heavily involved in the discourse surrounding the Public Health Association of Australia’s (PHAA) report on the model of implementation of NSPs in the Alexander Maconochie Centre (AMC) in the ACT. The paper recommended a contingency process in developing NSP rules, procedures and protocols, as permitted by the ACT Corrections Management Act 2007 as well as the provision of secure syringe disposal bins and dedicated Aboriginal Health Workers for the NSPs. Justice Action endorsed the recommendations made by the PHAA to the ACT government having directly consulted the residents of the AMC. A media release was also published addressing fears that clean syringes provided NSPs would give prisoners weapons to use.