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| Florida prisons among AIDS deaths leaders |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 07/19/2004 |
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Johnny Davis escaped the death penalty when he was convicted of murdering a young hitchhiker nearly two decades ago. Now he has a death sentence for which there is no appeal. Davis has AIDS. "To me, it's like a living hell," said the 40-year-old inmate, locked up for life at prison in this North Florida town. "You wake up in the morning, wondering if you are on a downhill slide." Florida led the nation with 39 AIDS deaths in prison in 2001, the most recent year that federal statistics are available, followed by 32 in Texas and 28 in New York. Those states also accounted for about half of all HIV-infected inmates in the nation in 2001, with 5,500 in New York, 2,602 in Florida and 2,388 Texas. But the death rate has steadily decreased since 1995 as new drugs have become available to treat the disease more aggressively. The rate of AIDS deaths in prisons nationwide dropped from 100 per 100,000 inmates in 1995 to 20 in 2001. In Florida, the number of AIDS inmate deaths dropped from 150 in 1995 to just three so far in 2004. Although the death rate has declined, the cost of treating AIDS prisoners has increased to $10.1 million a year in Florida because of the high cost of the antiretroviral therapies and other drugs. That's about a quarter of the state Department of Corrections' budget for all drugs. And the AIDS drugs only postpone the inevitable. Since 1995, 663 Florida inmates have died from AIDS. The Florida prisons agency knows of 3,226 prisoners who are HIV-positive and another 538 who have full-blown AIDS, but there may be many others. The number of HIV-positive inmates represents about 4.1 percent of Florida's 77,000 prisoners and is more than double the national average for state prisoners of 2 percent, according to the U.S. Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics. Florida prison officials don't know exactly how many HIV-positive inmates they have because an AIDS test is not mandatory, and the department will only test those who ask. The exception, based on a state law passed two years ago, requires inmates leaving prison to have an HIV test. If they test positive, they are given a one-month supply of AIDS drugs when they are freed. The percentage of women prisoners with AIDS is always higher, primarily because of illegal drug use, prostitution and other hazardous lifestyles, prison officials say. The number of women who were HIV-positive in 2001 in Florida was 9.3 percent, although it has dropped to 7 percent this year. The same year, the percentage of men who were HIV-positive in Florida was 3.2 percent. |
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