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Thu, January 27, 2005

Cons get cheap tattoos
PILOT PROJECT WILL COST TAXPAYERS $3.7 MILLION, TORY MP SAYS
By ALAN CAIRNS, TORONTO SUN

A $3.7-MILLION, six-year pilot project that gives Canada's prison inmates dirt-cheap tattoos is a "ludicrous" expenditure of taxpayer funds, a Tory MP said yesterday. Correctional Services Canada (CSC) will install tattoo parlours in six prisons in a bid to stop the spread of HIV and hepatitis C through the use of dirty tattoo needles.

Inmates will get a two-hour prison tattoo session for $5.

"The people who are really sick across Canada must wonder what we are thinking about when we subsidize inmates for something that is totally unnecessary," Tory MP Randy White said.

HEALTH CARE

"This is presented by CSC as some kind of health-care program ... when Canadians with diabetes have to go out and buy their own needles," he said.

For years, CSC reports have concluded that a greater percentage of people in the federal prison population have tested positive for AIDS antibodies or other serious blood diseases than in the general Canadian population.

White believes most federal prisoners who have the diseases contracted them either through sex or by using dirty needles to inject drugs such as heroin.

CSC officials have told White they are following prison tattoo practices developed in Australia and Portugal but he cannot find any evidence of similar programs in those countries, he said.

White also ridiculed CSC's plan to staff the tattoo parlours with inmates.

"Not only will we subsidize the inmates to get tattoos, but we will pay inmates to staff the parlours," he said, adding CSC has agreed to pay inmate tatooists the going in-prison job rate of $5 to $6 an hour.

PLAN ADOPTED?

White said the annual cost of prison tattoo parlours will reach $611,000 in the first year, which means a cost of almost $3.7 million over the duration of the six-year pilot.

If the plan is adopted, which White says it almost certainly will be, and goes into Canada's 53 prisons, taxpayers could be on the hook for more than $5 million each year, White said.

"I've never seen a pilot project yet that didn't continue."

White challenged CSC to show him "one study that says this is a good idea."

White wonders how the feds can use the health protection argument to give inmates subsidized tattoos and not extend that service to "citizens who have not committed crimes."