Lawyers sure know how to fleece the system.  One of these societal leeches just filed suit against the federal government for the (gasp!) horror of refusing to provide clean needles to incarcerated criminals so those inmates can inject themselves with smuggled illegal drugs.

It’s absurd on its face, yet somehow lawyers like Sandra Ka Hon Chu manage to convince themselves that reality, well, isn’t.

Sandra Ka Hon Chu conveniently sets aside the fact that the very reason these folks are in prison in the first place is because they have violated the rights of others, hence their now being inside a prison system where they have no rights.

Or at least they shouldn’t.

Let’s take a look at just two short sentences uttered from the idiotic mouth of Sandra Ka Hon Chu as they were reported in the Globe and Mail.

“Prisoners are entitled to health care just like we all are. … It’s discriminatory when we say we don’t provide them with the tools to protect themselves. It’s a huge public health benefit when you have people coming out from prison with fewer risk behaviours and fewer infections.”

Any 3rd grade kid can see what’s wrong here.  Chu is a nutbar that wouldn’t know logic if it jumped up and bit her in the face.

“Prisoners are entitled to health care just like we all are.”

Yes, they are.

They are entitled to doctors to diagnose their physical illnesses and medicine to treat those illnesses.  Every prisoner in Canadian prisons already has this.  More than a lot of actual Canadians not residing in federal prison, I might add.

It’s discriminatory when we say we don’t provide them with the tools to protect themselves.

That is, simply put, a load of bovine defecation.

We are not discriminating against a drug addict by refusing to enable their addiction, yet that’s the argument she’s making.

You do not break the cycle of addiction by feeding the addict in prison more drugs.  That’s just plain stupid.

“It’s a huge public health benefit when you have people coming out from prison with fewer risk behaviours and fewer infections.”

Fewer risk behaviours?  Does this nanny state ninny think before she opens her mouth?

I hate to break the news to you, Ms. Chu, but clearly someone has to: intravenous drug use IS a “risk behavior.”

We’re already drowning under a tidal wave of entitlement in this nation. Quebec university students who feel “owed” an education simply because they can breathe without medical assistance are a fine example.

By enabling addicts in prison the only thing you teach them is that they are entitled to continue their “risky behaviours”, that they are entitled to do illegal drugs… that they are entitled to free needles so they can inject those illegal drugs into their bodies… that they are entitled to overdose and that someone else will always foot the tab for their poor life choices.

That is absurd.

It is certainly not the kind of help for addicts I would prefer.

Prisons are, shock of shocks, a place where people are incarcerated because they violated the laws the rest of us abide by.  Prisons are supposed to be places where you cannot drink alcohol, where you cannot access drugs, where you cannot inject illegal drugs into your body.

They’re not supposed to be holiday resorts where anything goes.

Imagine that.

Steven Simons, one of the appellants behind the legal action, contracted Hepatitis C “during his incarceration in a federal penitentiary as a result of another prisoner using his injection equipment and inadequate access to sterile equipment for his own use,” the suit alleges.

As callous as it may sound, Mr. Simons shouldn’t have been doing drugs in prison in the first place.

It’s not the fault of  the Canadian government (or the Canadian people) that he contracted Hep-C.

It’s his own.

And that’s the problem with this lawsuit; it makes poor life choices the responsibility of Canadians across the country, while simultaneously enabling the incarcerated drug addict to abdicate their own personal responsibility.

News Flash: If you want people to make better choices and accept responsibility for those choices, then here’s a radical idea: help them make better choices.  Don’t simply enable and support their current self-destructive ones.

What Citizen Chu is proposing is this:

All inmates would get clean needles, subject to strict rules around keeping them in a spot guards can check up on. Users caught injecting would still be punished for breaking the law, just as users caught with drugs would still be in possession of contraband.

While the Globe article makes no mention of what prison guards think of this lunacy, I can’t imagine for a second that they’re  in favour of it.  Giving needles to inmates just adds one more layer of danger to their daily lives, all so do-gooders like Chu can feel better about herself as she lays her head down to sleep at night.

Setting aside the obvious lunacy of the Supreme Court’s decision in Vancouver’s InSite supervised injection site, this case is not the same for one very important reason: the drug addicts using the  InSite injection facility are not federally incarcerated criminals.

Drugs are illegal, like it or not, and prisons are places where inmates should not have access to them.  Period.

That said, if we’re now going to give incarcerated drug addicts in prison clean needles so they can do heroin, then why even bother with the guards and the gates?

Will we give imprisoned gang members knives and guns too, since refusing to do so would violate their right to self-defense?