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| Alabama prison at center of suit over AIDS policy |
| By New York Times |
| Published: 11/03/2003 |
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Prisoners who need AIDS or H.I.V. medication at the Limestone Correctional Facility in Alabama must get up at 3 in the morning to stand in line for it. The wait can take 45 minutes. Then they repeat the exercise at 10 in the morning, and again at 3 in the afternoon. Those who are too sleepy or sick to stand in line miss out, a federal lawsuit maintains. Whether convicted of shoplifting or murder, every male felon in Alabama who has AIDS or H.I.V. is sent to this medium-security prison near Huntsville. Here they live, eat, sleep, exercise, see the doctor and wait in lines in a unit strictly segregated from the rest of the prison. Alabama is the only state to keep inmates with H.I.V. or AIDS isolated from other prisoners - not only in its cells, but in all prison programs. This policy was meant, prison officials have said, to limit the health and security problems posed by infected prisoners, and the courts have endorsed it as a reasonable reaction to the dangers of H.I.V. But its critics say that at least as practiced in Alabama, segregation is dangerous and inhumane to those prisoners, subjecting them to shoddier health care, a greater risk of communicable diseases and harsher living conditions than those of other inmates. David M. Lipman, a Miami lawyer and other lawyers for Limestone's inmates with H.I.V. filed the suit in federal court in Birmingham last November, contending that the prisoners' living conditions and medical care were a form of cruel and unusual punishment. A medical expert for the plaintiffs, Dr. Stephen Tabet, who specializes in infectious diseases at the University of Washington, concluded that being admitted to Limestone with AIDS was akin to a death sentence. The rate of AIDS-related deaths among Alabama prisoners in 2000 was more than twice the national prison average, according to the Justice Department. Thirty-nine men with H.I.V. have died at Limestone since 1999. A recent state-sponsored audit called the six AIDS deaths at the prison in the first 10 months of 2002 a "remarkably high" number. Until recently, the H.I.V.-positive prisoners were held in a vast converted warehouse filled with row after row of beds - the perfect setting, the lawsuit says, for the spread of infections that can be deadly among people with compromised immune systems. As of the end of 2000, the Justice Department says, there were slightly more than 25,000 inmates in the nation's prisons who were known to be infected with H.I.V., accounting for more than 2 percent of all prisoners. Nearly half were in three states: New York, Florida and Texas. But only 20 states, including Alabama, test all prisoners for H.I.V., so the number of infected prisoners may be substantially higher. In approving Alabama's practice of segregation, the courts have noted that states that integrate H.I.V.-positive inmates with the rest of the prison population see many more new H.I.V. infections than does Alabama. Alabama spends less money per prisoner than any other state, both as a general matter and for medical care. Yet just the medicine for only one H.I.V.-positive inmate costs $8,000 to $12,000 a year, according to the state audit. The sole doctor here, who is responsible for the care of 1,823 prisoners, including 237 with H.I.V., said this medication cost even more. The tension between scant resources and great need has taken an enormous toll, the lawsuit says. |
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