383P
BREAKING THE CYCLE (BTC) PHASE I: HIV, IDU, AND PRISON RECIDIVISM
T Howard, A Mulkins, F Ibanez-Carrasco
British Columbia Persons with AIDS Society, Vancouver, British Columbia
Objectives: In British Columbia, a significant number of people with HIV/AIDS (PWAs), a proportion of whom are injection drug users (IDUs), leave prison, re-enter a cycle of poverty with limited access to health care resources, re-join drug use and criminal activity networks and eventually return to the corrections system. BTC was a community based research (CBR) project to 1. build capacity among a stigmatized group (HIV+ active IDUs with a history of incarceration) to become "peer researchers", 2. retrieve baseline ethnographic data from participants to develop a rigorous social scientific proposal; and 3. translate this knowledge into new approaches to services at the BCPWA Prison Outreach Program (POP).
Methods: Aided by volunteer research specialists and one Coordinator, ten peer researchers attended a series of workshops that combined popular education with training in basic social scientific research methods. An iterative process was followed to retrieve and interpret preliminary data and to build each section of a formal research protocol.
Results: A great deal of ethnographic data were collected from peer researcher's lived experience. HIV+ active IDUs with a history of incarceration when facing hardship, devise successful albeit temporary ways of "hacking" the system (eg, "passing" as HIV+ for HIV– persons wanting to access social services). In addition, Breaking the Cycle (BCPWA POP) joined the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS project CHASE (Community Health and Safety Evaluation) to submit one proposal to CIHR 2005.
Conclusions: This combination of popular education, CBR and community development was successful. It is not driven by an illusion that persons living with poverty, illness and addiction would become professional researchers, but by evidence that learning basic research techniques may gradually transform stigmatized individuals/groups into vigorous "readers" and "consumers", not passive subjects of research done "on their bodies and lives'. Thus, CBR allows community members to engage in evidence-based advocacy.