by The Canadian Press

(Toronto, Ontario) An Ontario man serving a life sentence for killing a policeman is to be honored for years of efforts to educate prison inmates about how to lower their risk of becoming infected with HIV.

The Canadian HIV-AIDS Legal Network and Human Rights Watch announced Monday that they are giving their 2008 Canadian Award for Action on HIV/AIDS and Human Rights to Peter Collins.

Collins, 46, has spent the last 25 years in jail for killing an Ottawa policeman during a botched armed robbery. Just last week Collins, who is incarcerated at Bath Institution, a medium security prison about 30 miles west of Kingston, Ont., learned his second application for parole had been denied.

Peter Collins wasn’t immediately available for interview. But his father, Michael Collins, said learning that Peter was being honored for his advocacy for health services and HIV prevention tools for fellow inmates made him proud of his son.

“Definitely. We’re all sort of just jumping at this point, really. It’s amazing,” said the elder Collins, who lives in Carleton Place in the Ottawa River Valley.

“All these years that we’ve been living with Peter being in prison and then to have this come out of the blue, that he’s such a notable person that they’re going to give him an award _ it makes a nice change.”

The HIV-AIDS Legal Network and Human Rights Watch cited Peter Collins’ work as a peer education counselor, saying he’s been educating fellow inmates about HIV prevention since the late 1980s. He has advocated for better health care and HIV prevention services in prisons, including tattoo parlors that use sterile equipment and needle exchange programs.

Richard Elliott, executive director of the HIV-AIDS Legal Network, said the award not only recognizes Collins’ efforts, “but also highlights how much still needs to be done to ensure prisoners’ basic human right to protect themselves against HIV and hepatitis C.”

He admitted the organizations use this award, given out annually since 2002, to focus attention both on the recipient and on HIV prevention issues that the groups are working on, in this case making sterile needles available to prisoners who use injection drugs to lower rates of transmission of HIV and hepatitis C in prisons.

Figures provided by Corrections Service Canada and published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal last year showed that in 2004 more than 3,300 male and female inmates in Canada’s 54 prisons had hepatitis C in 2004 and almost 200 prisoners were infected with HIV.

A 2004 report on the health of inmates that was commissioned by the correctional service showed that inmates were 30 times more likely to inject drugs than non-prisoners. They were also 20 times more likely to have hepatitis C and 10 times more likely to be infected with HIV than the non-prison population.

Yet they do not have access to the needle exchange programs that injection drug users across the country have been able to avail themselves of for years, Elliott said in an interview.

“Drug use in prison is no more illegal than it is outside prison. It’s still an offence,” he said.

“But one of the central points in this whole debate about harm reduction and its role in drug policy is: It doesn’t matter that drugs are illegal. That doesn’t mean that we keep people from getting access to the health services they need.”

Elliott noted that Switzerland, Spain, Germany and a few other countries have safely instituted needle exchange programs in prisons.

But with the current federal government’s opposition to harm reduction measures _ it cancelled the prison tattoo program and is opposed to Vancouver’s safer injection site _ Elliott doesn’t see Canada following suit any time soon. “I think we’re going backward, unfortunately, on some of these issues.”

He said prisoners are entitled to the same kinds of health services people outside of prisons can receive. And he suggested it’s in society’s interest to prevent HIV and hepatitis C transmission in prisons.

“Because most prisoners do leave prison eventually. They serve their time. They go back into their communities. So what happens to their health while they’re in prison obviously affects the broader public health,” Elliott said.

“It makes fiscal sense, it makes human rights sense, it makes public health sense to have these kinds of health services available … to prisoners. I think, unfortunately, the real barrier is an ideological one.”