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| Study Links AIDS, Race and Prison |
| By The Washington Post |
| Published: 03/13/2006 |
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It is one of the most puzzling mysteries of the AIDS epidemic: Why did blacks, in little more than a dozen years, become nine times as likely as whites to contract a disease once associated almost exclusively with gay white men? Two researchers say they found the answer: prison. Rucker C. Johnson and Steven Raphael of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley analyzed census data and a federal database containing information on 850,000 men and women who contracted AIDS between 1982 and 1996. They discovered that the surge in black AIDS patients particularly women since the early 1980s closely tracked the increase in the proportion of black men in America's prisons, which by the 1990s had become vast reservoirs of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. The percentage of prisoners who were black increased from 40 percent in 1982 to well over half in 1996, according to government data. At the same time, get-tough sentencing policies more than doubled the prison population, producing even more infected black men who passed the disease on to black women after they were released. So powerful is the relationship between race, prison and AIDS that it almost completely explains why half of all new AIDS patients in 2002 were black even though only 12 percent of the population is black. |
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