Time Out
by Rachel Maddow
Feds to prisoners: Get out of
jail, get counseling and care
The
Brightest progress in services for HIVers can be
found at your local correctional facility—if only because there is so much
room for improvement. Often, inmates are returned to their communities with
no idea where to look for the health care and counseling they need. But since
the Ryan White CARE Act and an innovative federal project began freeing up
funding for AIDS organizations to look after recently and soon-to-be-released
prisoners with HIV three years ago, new programs are breaking out all
over.
“We’re there to ask, ‘Did you go to the doctor? Have you taken your meds?’”
said Jean’quel Henry, prison liaison for Family
Service of Greater Baton Rouge. “Upon leaving that structured [prison]
environment, it can help to have someone ask those questions.” Since last
July, the Ryan White Act lets case workers put prisoners on their client
lists as early as six months before they exit the prison gates. So every
month, Henry visits Louisiana’s
East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, hooking up HIV positive prisoners with the
local services and medical care they’ll need on the outside.
Henry told POZ, “When people get out, there’s that fear of the
unknown. A lot of times no one else knows they’re HIV positive. So we let
them know that there are services and support.” In its first 10 months, her
program eased 112 discharged state and parish prisoners back into society;
only three have been rearrested.
Anne Lemoine is the health care manager inside the
East Baton Rouge Parish Prison, where 5.8 percent of the women and 2.1
percent of the men have HIV. “We’re the public-health deathtraps,” Lemoine said. “This is where infectious diseases end up.”
Her jail isn’t funded to offer discharge planning to HIV positive prisoners,
so the services Henry and other outside case managers provide are crucial.
Since 1999, California,
New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Florida, Georgia and Massachusetts have joined a CDC discharge
planning project, setting up programs similar to the one in Louisiana. John Miles, former Special
Assistant for Corrections and Substance Abuse at the CDC, said these services
are expanding “because community activists are saying, ‘We can’t let people
fall through the cracks.”
Prisoner advocates are cheered by these efforts but aren’t ready to stop
there. ACT UP/Philadelphia’s Asia Russell asked, “What about the thousands of
positive people still locked up, facing medical neglect and discrimination?
That’s a real test for the AIDS community—do we care enough to confront
prison medical neglect and bigotry?”
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