Requesting Information on Condoms in Prisons

[Guest guest]

Dear Forum,

Ref message: Dear Forum Members, I am a broadcast journalist based in New Delhi.

I had recieved a mail earlier about the increaing problem of HIV/AIDS in jails

which the government doesnt acknowledge. As a result, condoms are not made

available to prisoners. I need some more information regarding this. Would you

have any more details about this and can you send me some contacts with whom I

can speak with? Thanks, Mohuya Chaudhuri, E-mail: <mohuya@...>

___________________________

This is an interesting question about the rights of prisoners and the

obligation of governments to their protection.

Speaking from Australia, when a prisoner is incarcerated he loses all access

to the universal health care that he or she would enjoy whilst outside the

prison.

This means that it is up to the prison governmental structure as to what,

how much, when and how essential medical care is provided.

The prison does not like prisoners to die in custody because they are in

fact liable to explain and adjudicate on what went wrong.

I have instances of prisoners who were incarcerated for 30 days and were on

medication that must not be stopped suddenly. Despite warnings to the prison

many short term incarerated prisoners almost died from not being supplied

with appropriate medication at the correct time intervals and that is

despite court orders to that effect being attached to the sentencing

documents.

Most prisons test sentenced and remanded prisoners so that they can know in

advance of the status and therefore the risk to staff and other prisoners.

Confidentiality of this information is not guarded very well and the news

travels around the prison and out into the community before the prisoner

even has a chance to assimilate what it means.

In Long Bay gaol in NSW which was the first prison to start testing an

interesting observation can be made. This prison houses prisoners inside for

longer sentences and for more serious crimes. Evidence of them entering the

prison -ve to HIV and leaving +ve to HIV lead to a number of legal actions

against the prison for failing in their duty of care to provide protection

to their inmates. I am not aware of the details of any settlements but the

prison's reaction was not to provide the protection but simply to abandon

testing on admission so that the evidence would be non existent. Of course

if a prisoner was known to be +ve when admitted this information would be

noted by staff and other prisoners from the former sources.

The most interesting thing to me is the lack of access to appropriate care

and some might want to add, protection even if they buy what they need as

part of their prison rations.

I hope that others might also feed back on this subject because one of the

things that concerns me is that incarceration is debilitating enough without

getting the result of a blood test with no effective pre or post test

counselling and then determining to end ones existence whilst in prison

based on fear of the unknown.

I hold a strong view that effective pre and post test counselling should be

provided regardless of where the patient or prisoner is when they are

tested, and it should be punishable for that information to be available to

anyone other than, in the case of penetentiary's, the senior prison

officers and the prisoner concerned.

I guess what people often don't know is that prisoners generally have very

few rights. One of the additional problems with this is that for someone who

was taking ARV medication and then receive a sentence of incarceration there

is no obligation for the prisoner to maintain their regime leading to drug

resistance and potential life threatening deterioration in viral load.

Unfortunately there are no votes in prisoner rights.

Geoff Heaviside

E-mail: <gheaviside@...>