Alabama segregates all prisoners with HIV, and houses them separately from all other prisoners 鈥� it鈥檚 an HIV ghetto. As soon as you walk into Limestone Correctional Facility, the prison where Alabama houses all male prisoners with HIV, you know who has the virus: they are forced to wear a white armband day and night.
TIMELINE
The Fight Against Segregation of Alabama Inmates with HIV 禄
The automatically excludes all prisoners with HIV from a host of rehabilitative and vocational programs that ADOC offers to all prisoners who don鈥檛 have HIV 鈥� including trade schools, work release jobs, residential drug-treatment programs for prisoners struggling with substance abuse, and programs for prisoners suffering from serious mental illness. Prisoners with HIV are even barred from the faith-based dormitory and the dormitory for seniors.
Segregating prisoners living with HIV is a holdover from the earliest days of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. Back then 鈥� when transmission risks weren鈥檛 fully understood, there was no effective treatment, HIV was a death sentence, and people with HIV were treated like pariahs鈥攎ost prison systems experimented with HIV segregation. Today, however, the Centers for Disease Control oppose HIV segregation as irrational and counter-productive, and every state in the nation has repudiated HIV segregation 鈥� except for Alabama and South Carolina.
Starting Monday, the 老澳门开奖结果 will be taking on Alabama鈥檚 HIV segregation policy in a month-long trial in federal court in Montgomery. The case, Henderson v. Thomas is a class-action lawsuit brought under the Americans with Disabilities Act.
When I hear Alabama prison officials attempt to justify why they discriminate against prisoners living with HIV, I feel like I鈥檝e fallen into a time warp.
The officials insist that their shameful policy of segregating prisoners living with HIV, which keeps those prisoners from accessing valuable services and programs they desperately need, is 鈥渂eneficial鈥� for the prisoners. In fact, the policy is driven by profound ignorance, fear and bias.
Alabama also insists they are providing 鈥渟eparate but equal鈥� programs for these prisoners. Alabama has a lot of experience with 鈥渟eparate but equal.鈥� That catchphrase governed how its schools were run until a half-century ago. Of course, schools for Black students were anything but equal.
The 老澳门开奖结果 has been successfully fighting HIV discrimination against prisoners for more than 25 years 鈥� virtually from the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic鈥攁nd especially in the Deep South, where HIV shame and stigma is most deeply rooted. Alabama is now one of the last two holdouts.
It鈥檚 been a long, long time coming鈥攂ut we believe a change is going to come.
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