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| Progress in Alabama prisons |
| By salon.com |
| Published: 08/26/2009 |
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Alabama now lets HIV-positive inmates out on work release -- but de facto segregation of the HIV-positive continues. There is probably nowhere in the nation where the irrational fear of contagion from people with HIV has persisted so stubbornly as in Southern prisons – and no prison system in the nation where that fear has had such a stranglehold on policymakers as Alabama's. So it was an act of considerable political courage earlier this month when the commissioner of the Alabama Department of Corrections, Richard Allen, decided to put an end to the department's decades-long ban on prisoners with HIV from the state's work-release program. For the first time in a quarter-century, prisoners with HIV are now eligible to participate in this program which, more than any other, increases the odds for successful reentry to the community. Work-release allows prisoners to hold paying jobs in the community during the day, gain sorely needed job skills and experience, set aside savings for rent and child support, begin paying off court fees, and even find permanent jobs. The decision ending the ban on prisoners with HIV in Alabama's work-release program is a watershed moment in a two-decades-long effort by the ACLU, in alliance with many other advocates, to end arbitrary HIV discrimination against prisoners around the country. The campaign – which began with class-action litigation and evolved into a major organizing campaign dubbed "No Lost Causes" – was most intense in Alabama and Mississippi, the two states where HIV-segregation policies took their most extreme and entrenched forms. In those states, all prisoners with HIV were permanently quarantined and barred from every single prison program and activity offered to other prisoners – including chapel, choir, prison jobs, vocational training, college courses, early-release programs, substance-abuse treatment, therapeutic treatment communities for drug and alcohol abuse, faith-based programs, and access to libraries, baseball fields and gymnasiums. Programs like these not only have a major effect on a prisoner's quality of life during his or her sentence, but also influence parole boards assessing whether a prisoner's sentence has been sufficiently constructive and rehabilitative to warrant the prisoner's release. The exclusion of prisoners living with HIV from prison programs has the material impact of forcing prisoners with HIV, as a class, to serve longer sentences. Read More. |
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Prisoners should be treated as human and given all the facilities of learning. I am glad to read Influence of AI on technology in prisons to teach and introduce them with the current era of development.