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| Ohio Inmates Can Take Home AIDS Risk |
| By Akron Beacon Journal |
| Published: 04/05/2002 |
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Ohio's public health policy may have cost the state taxpayers millions in Medicaid money - and cost some Ohioans, particularly black Ohioans, their lives. The authors of a recent study make a strong case that Ohio's refusal to look at public health issues in its prisons and its prohibition of condom use are related to the rising numbers of AIDS cases among black men and black women. Prison officials in Ohio flatly deny this is the case. To say otherwise, said Reginald Wilkinson, director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, would be 'extremely disingenuous, misleading and inaccurate.' Wilkinson said that prisoners bring AIDS into the system from the outside. 'We're talking criminals here,' he said, stressing that many inmates used intravenous drugs before entering prison. Yet, his facts do not add up. *Ohio tests inmates on their way to prison, but it costs too much to do it on the way out. Each test costs $10.25. *The neighborhoods that prison inmates return to are the most infected with HIV in the state. *Black Ohioans are six times as likely to have HIV as white Ohioans. *The odds that a young black man has been in prison at some point since 1990 are one in four. In Ohio, a sexually active young black woman dating young black men would only have to date four to date one who has been in prison. A sexually active young white woman would have to date 27 white men to do the same. *Nine in every 1,000 male inmates in Ohio are known to be infected. *The Red Cross does not accept blood from anyone who has been held in a correctional facility for more than 72 consecutive hours. The agency considers them 'high risk environments for HIV and hepatitis,' according to a spokesperson. *In the past decade, 1,544 male inmates tested positive for the virus on their way to prison. Almost 70 percent were black. No one knows how many men left prison with the virus in those years. *Multiple interviews reveal that men in prison are more likely to have unprotected sex with other men, more likely to share needles if they use them, and more likely to get tattooed with equipment that is not clean. *An estimated 75 percent of black Ohio women diagnosed with HIV within the last two years of 1990 got it through heterosexual sex. AIDS doesn't spread well from women to men, a fact that activists and prevention experts don't often discuss. 'There's a general feeling, especially among health officials, that the high amount of [men who have sex with men]/heterosexual transmission in the African-American community is due to men who are in prisons,' according to Kenneth Cook, an AIDS prevention specialist with the Columbus Health Department. 'Everybody pretty much knows what goes on in prisons,' said the Akron Health Department's Chris Partis. 'But the prisons can't do anything about it because that would be admitting that a lot of this stuff goes on.' Opposition to coercive testing and to segregation of infected inmates are barriers to working on the problems. One suggestion is that prisons could provide condoms. But only two states and a handful of jails allow condoms. In addition, Ohio has no plans to let the state health department handle AIDS prevention in prison. |
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