American’s prisons have become HIV factories, yet federal and state prison officials refuse to recognize that fact. At hearings before President Clinton’s AIDS Advisory Council, federal prison officials essentially said that they believed there was not any HIV transmission in federal prisons. State by state, the degree to which officials face the problem varies.


Each week brings letters to POZ from prisoners describing conditions that are so unbelievably brutal and inhumane that they defy any of us to explain why we’re not camped out at the prison gates demanding action.


In virtually all prisons, condoms are not available to inmates because sexual activity is officially not allowed in prisons. But consensual sex, as well as rape, are imbedded into the prison landscape.


In England, conscientious physicians have sought to fulfill their moral obligation to protect their patients by “prescribing” condoms. Failure to do so, they believe, is a violation of the Hippocratic oath obligating physicians and could potentially expose the doctors to legal action for failing to protect their patients from acquiring HIV in prison.


For the prison officials, it is a way around regulations restricting condom distribution. “Our position is very straightforward” says Anne Widdecombe, the UK Prisons Minister. “It is within the discretion of the responsible medical officers what they prescribe, whether it’s medicine, condoms, or treatments for anything else in each individual case.”


In the U.S., the hierarchy of throw-away HIV populations places prisoners at a subsurface level. That won’t change until AIDS activists and others who care about basic human dignity join the too-tiny prison reform movement and human rights efforts to demand change.