New South Wales ice inquiry hears that corrections department has no ‘overall strategy’ to deal with drug use in ballooning prison population

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

The department responsible for managing New South Wales’ ballooning prison population has “no overall drug strategy” and remains “steadfastly opposed” to a needle exchange program in jails, despite the urging of health officials.

On Monday a government-commissioned inquiry into ice and other amphetamines turned its attention to drug use among inmates, hearing that as the state’s prison population has exploded, so too has the use of illicit drugs in jails.

But despite that, the counsel assisting the commission, Sally Dowling SC, told the inquiry that Corrective Services New South Wales has no overall drug strategy and is actively resisting calls for a needle exchange program made by the Justice Health department.

The NSW prison population has exploded since the Coalition government was voted into power in 2011. In her opening address, Dowling said it had grown by about 40% – from 9,602 to 13,630 inmates – between 2012 and 2018.

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At the same time, statistics from the Justice Health department from 2015 showed that two-thirds of the prison population were using crystal methamphetamine before entering a corrections facility, and 41% of all inmates were daily users before being incarcerated.

“That number has increased substantially since then,” Dowling told the inquiry.

“Applying the 2015 rate, which is conservative, that means that last year around 8,000 people entered custody with active methamphetamine use. That’s approximately 22 people per day.”

The commission, Dowling said, would also hear about the “ready availability of drugs in prisons” and the “prevalence of injecting drug use in custody”. The 2015 Justice Health survey found that more than half of participants said drugs were either quite easy or very easy to obtain in jail, and 15.6% reported using methamphetamine while in jail.

Dowling revealed to the inquiry that in the first six months of 2019, the number of drug tests on inmates that returned positive results for ice already exceed the 697 found last year, despite 60% fewer tests being conducted.

Despite that, she said, the corrective services department “does not have an overall drug strategy”.

“Despite 8,000 people detoxing from methamphetamine in custody per annum and higher numbers if other drugs are included, there is no system whereby these inmates are targeted for … treatment support,” she said.

She quoted a submission from an official from corrective services who stated that in February this year the department had begun developing a drug strategy.

“This work to date involved conducting a literature review and scan of CSNSW’s existing programs and policies,” the department official said.

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Dowling said the inquiry would hear evidence that the Justice Health department “actively seeks” a needle exchange program in prisons in NSW to address hepatitis C transmission and “broader health problems” associated with non-sterile drug injecting.

However, she said, the state’s corrective services department is “steadfastly opposed to such a program”.

She said the inquiry would hear evidence the corrective department’s harm reduction policy “does not comply with international best practice”.

She said Justice Health, the entity responsible for providing health services in custody, “advocates a different approach to caring for injecting drug users in jail, an approach that is rejected by CSNSW”.

This week the inquiry will also hear evidence about a lack of drug treatment support outside of prison.

Dowling quoted a submission to the inquiry by the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists which stated that post-release support to prevent reoffending in NSW is “inadequate or non-existent in the majority of cases” and that there is “a paucity of services available for ATS users, particularly those with severe mental illness”.

A submission from the Shopfront Legal Services called post-custodial support “woefully inadequate”.

The government-commissioned inquiry into the drug ice and other amphetamine-type stimulants is considering legalisation or decriminalisation as a means of addressing growing prevalence of crystal methamphetamine addiction in parts of the state.

Established in November last year following a spate of ice-related deaths, the inquiry has heard from a chorus of health and legal experts including the NSW Bar Association, who say the criminalisation of drug addicts may be causing more harm than drug use itself.



