Darrell Garrett remembers many things about the 21/2 years he spent in several California prisons.
The 41-year-old can tell you about cafeteria brawls and selling cigarettes at San Quentin. He can tell you the exact size of his cell at Vacaville.
He can tell you about men finding places to have sex where guards couldn't see.
He can't tell you what caused him to develop AIDS several years ago.
"I used to shoot dope, but I always kept my own needle," said Garrett, an El Cerrito resident. "I had a lot of women back in the day, too. I really just don't know."
What parolees don't know or won't say about their HIV or AIDS status, or how they deal with the illness after they return home has become a concern of health educators.
State prison officials say 1,163 HIV-positive men currently live in state prisons. Because prisons don't routinely test inmates, the number of infected parolees likely is higher. Community health workers say an unknown number of parolees return to the East Bay often ill-educated, impoverished and uninformed.
"People just don't understand how the virus can spread so easily," said community health worker Sandy Johnson.
HIV rates in minority women have increased in Pittsburg because some are the spouses of parolees who don't know they're infected, she said. Health educators with the Pittsburg Pre-School and Community Council Inc. talked to 113 high-risk women from July 2003 to June of this year and found 60 percent had had sexual relationships or shared needles with a partner who had been in prison or jail. Also, 20 of 28 HIV-positive women with whom the council works said they had sex with men who have been behind bars. [...] But the most basic protective device -- the condom -- is illegal, as are inmate sexual relations. "I have heard stories where the guards just turn their heads the other way, so why not let condoms protect them?" Johnson asks. The answer: Sex between inmates is illegal and so issuing condoms would not be appropriate, said Margot Bach, a state Corrections Department spokeswoman.
Here's the question: assuming that AIDS education in prison was much much better -- that they had the time and resources to make sure that prisoners understood the consequences of unprotected sex -- exactly what would they expect the men to do about it? The state is unlikely to concede that men are, in fact, having sex in prison against the rules. Only two states -- Vermont, and, of all places, Mississippi -- and four cities distribute condoms to inmates. Most state administrators would rather be shot than to admit that prisons do, in fact, facilitate sexual contact between men, especially those in for long-term sentences.
The other thing is this: even if the prisons were to concede that point and allow condom distribution, it wouldn't take care of all the disease transmission because it would be making the assumption that all sexual contact in prison is voluntary and controlled, and that's simply not the case. Sexual assault is notably frequent, and rapists are relatively likely to be unconcerned about the health of their victim, and many feel that the insertive partner in intercourse is far less likely to come down with HIV. (That said, a truly cynical approach would be to mention, when making condoms available, that they lessen the ability to collect evidence against a rapist. To be sure, most victims in prison are too cowed to report an assault unless they're so badly damaged that they have no choice.)
Posted by iain at August 23, 2004 02:14 PM
