Queensland’s continued opposition to providing condoms to prisoners – at least a decade after all other states began doing so – leaves the state at enhanced risk of legal action, lawyers and health experts say.
The World Health Organization has long recommended that condoms be provided to prisoners. But Prof Basil Donovan, the head of Kirby Institute’s sexual health program, says a lack of political will has left Queensland dragging its feet on the issue, to the detriment of the wider population.
“Prisons are like turbo-charges – they keep blood-borne viruses and sexually transmitted diseases thriving in the community,” he said.
“But what’s the old saying? Ideology always trumps evidence.”
New South Wales and Western Australia began providing condoms to prisoners in the 1990s, and every other state and territory began doing so by 2013.
Queensland ran a trial of condoms in prisons in the 1990s but since then progress has stalled.
Donovan said the Kirby Institute had published research that disproved all of the reasons that prison officers normally objected to over providing condoms “a long, long time ago”.
“Our research showed that if you have condoms you don’t have sex more or less often,” he said. “It’s just that if you do have sex, it’s much more likely to be safe sex.”
Donovan warned that Queensland’s hesitance to provide condoms could open the state up to legal action.
“NSW was the first place to bring in condoms and that was about 20 years back,” he said. “And they didn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
“Basically, one of the prisoners went to sue the corrective services department [after contracting HIV] ... and the lawyers came in and say, you cannot defend your stance on denying people condoms.”
Candice Heisler, a senior associate for the personal injury department at Lockett McCullough Lawyers, said the government could be found liable if a prisoner contracted a sexually transmitted infection while in their custody.
“If you’re going to pursue a negligence claim, we would ordinarily need to prove that there was a risk of injury that’s foreseeable and that [the government] has a duty of care [to a prisoner],” Heisler said.
“It’s well known that unsafe sex leads to sexually transmitted infections and we’re talking about a densely populated environment of high-risk individuals … condoms would be the bare minimum that they ought to provide to reduce that risk.”
The director at Prisoners’ Legal Service, Helen Blaber, said prisons and health authorities owed a duty of care to people in prison.
“There are certainly human rights concerns associated with the failure to provide condoms in prison, particularly given the evidence surrounding the harm-reduction benefits,” she told Guardian Australia.
“What constitutes a breach of that duty of care is going to depend on the circumstances.”
The chief executive of Queensland Injectors Health Network, Geoff Davey, said better protections for prisoners would also assist the wider community who were at risk upon their release.
He called for prisoners to be provided dental dams and condoms, the testing of Hep C, and the introduction of needle and syringe programs.
A Queensland Health spokesperson said the department “continues to work closely with Queensland Corrective Services to reduce the risk of infectious diseases in correctional facilities, including consideration of evidence-based preventative measures and interventions”.
