More evidence or stronger political will: exploring the feasibility of needle and syringe programs in Ukrainian prisons
Bibliographic record
Abstract
INTRODUCTION: In 2007, the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended for prison authorities to introduce prison needle and syringe programs (PNSP) if they have any evidence that injecting drug use is taking place in prisons. This article presents descriptive evidence that injecting drug use takes place in Ukrainian prisons, it discusses how (denial of) access to injection equipment is regulated in the current system and what changes should be considered in order to implement PNSP. BACKGROUND: Ukrainian prisons still live by the laws and policies adopted in the Soviet Union. Besides laws and regulations, these legacies are replicated through the organization and infrastructure of the prison's physical space, and through "carceral collectivism" as a specific form of living and behaving. Inviolability of the prison order over time helps the prison staff to normalize and routinely rationalize punishment enforcement as a power "over" prisoners, but not a power "for" achieving a specific goal. METHODS: The Participatory Action Research approach was used as a way of involving different actors in the study's working group and research process. The data were gathered through 160 semi-structured interviews with prison health care workers, guards, people who inject drugs (PWID) who served one or several terms and other informants. RESULTS: The "expertise" in drug use among prisoners demonstrated by prison staff tells us two things-they admit that injecting use takes place in prisons, and that the surveillance of prisoner behavior has been carried out constantly since the very beginning as a core function of control. The communal living conditions and prison collectivism may not only produce and reproduce a criminal subculture but, using the same mechanisms, produce and reproduce drug use in prison. The "political will" incorporated into prison laws and policies is essential for the revision of outdated legacies and making PNSP implementation feasible. CONCLUSION: PNSP implementation is not just a question of having evidence of injecting drug use in the hands of prison authorities. For PNSP to be feasible in the prison environment, there is a need for specific changes to transition from one historical period and political leadership to another. And, thus, to make PNSP work requires making power work for change, and not just for reproducing the power itself.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".