In April, Shook had been pulled over on Greenbriar for driving the wrong way down a one-way street. He refused the Breathalyzer test. He pleaded guilty to DWI, prepared to do his time. What he wasn't prepared for was having the pills he took each day, the ones that kept him healthy, taken away from him during his incarceration.
Shook has been HIV-positive for 15 years and has had AIDS for the last four. A person with HIV develops AIDS when the T-cell count drops below 200. (An HIV-free person normally has 1,000 T-cells.)
Shook, whose T-cell count dipped to less than 100, did not see a triage nurse until ten days after his initial written request -- even though the jail's own policy mandates that a nurse should see a patient within 24 hours of a sick-call. It took 18 days for Shook to receive his pills after coming into custody, which seemed a matter of life or death to him because interrupting an HIV drug regimen can render the virus resistant to drugs.
"Should a DWI be a death sentence?" he wrote in a letter from jail.
HIV in Prisons and Jails, 1999 (report issued July 2001, NCJ 187456)
In jurisdictions -- state, county, and federal included -- with more than 1,000 HIV-positive Inmates:
* New York held more than a quarter of all prison inmates (7,000) known to be HIV positive at yearend 1999.
* In State prisons 27% of HIV- positive inmates were confirmed AIDS cases; in Federal prisons, 37% had AIDS.
* The overall rate of confirmed AIDS among the Nation's prison population (0.60%) was 5 times the rate in the U.S. general population (0.12%).
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
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12/19/2001: vive la france
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12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
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