Sep 08, 2010
San Francisco County Jail installs condom machines for inmates
San Francisco County Jail has installed 16 condom machines for the 75- inmates at its San Bruno lockup, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
The move is an extension of a safe-sex program that began in 1989 when health workers gave condoms to inmates as part of their counseling before their release, columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross writes in the Chronicle.
Although sex among inmates in technically illegal, the paper notes, the sheriff's department decided to install the machines anyway.
Sheriff Michael Hennessey acknowledges that the decision "may be controversial," but says the larger health-education message is important.
The program is paid for by small grants.
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( 0 / 0 )[The Center for Health Justice grew out of an effort in California to end a similar policy of segregating prisoners living with HIV. What a great thing that the U.S. Department of Justice is now doing the same in South Carolina!]
South Carolina: End Segregation of HIV-infected Prisoners
Justice Department Warns State About Discriminatory, Inadequate Treatment
AUGUST 6, 2010
Prison officials in South Carolina defend their segregation policy as necessary to protect the prisoners' health, but they are wrong. There is no medical justification for the policy, which promotes stigma, perpetuates misinformation about HIV, violates medical privacy, and restricts prisoners' ability to participate in prison programs
Megan McLemore, senior health researcher at Human Rights Watch
(New York) - South Carolina should stop segregating HIV-positive prisoners from the rest of the prison population, a policy that promotes stigma and discrimination, Human Rights Watch said today. The US Department of Justice, in a letter to South Carolina prison officials that came to light this week, threatened legal action unless prisoners with HIV are provided housing, prison job programs, and work release opportunities on an equal basis with other prisoners.
The Justice Department letter, dated June 22, 2010, also criticized medical and mental health care for to the state's HIV-positive prisoners. It came two months after Human Rights Watch and the ACLU issued "Sentenced to Stigma," a report documenting the harmful consequences of Alabama's and South Carolina's segregation of prisoners with HIV. They are the only states that separate these prisoners from the general prison population as a matter of policy.
"Prison officials in South Carolina defend their segregation policy as necessary to protect the prisoners' health, but they are wrong," said Megan McLemore, senior health researcher at Human Rights Watch. "There is no medical justification for the policy, which promotes stigma, perpetuates misinformation about HIV, violates medical privacy, and restricts prisoners' ability to participate in prison programs."
National and international guidelines on correctional health call for integration of prisoners living with HIV into the general prison population.
In South Carolina, all HIV-positive prisoners - regardless of the severity of their offense - are housed at Broad River facility for men or Camille Graham prison for women, both maximum security prisons that also house death row prisoners. Assigned to a high-security facility without regard to criminal background and denied the ability to transfer to pre-release and re-entry programs at other units, prisoners with HIV serve longer sentences, under the harsher conditions inside maximum security facilities, than prisoners who are not HIV-positive.
Prisoners living with HIV are barred from numerous prison jobs that earn extra work credits that apply toward early release. South Carolina is the only state in the union to prohibit HIV-positive prisoners from participating in work-release programs.
"Keeping people living with HIV in prison longer and limiting their chances for successful re-entry is not only discriminatory, it is bad policy and costly to the state," McLemore said.
In their report, Human Rights Watch and the ACLU documented the mental suffering of prisoners with HIV who are subjected to forced HIV testing and then identified by their status. Prisoners spoke of how family members and friends discovered their HIV status through their prison housing assignment, in many cases because fellow prisoners would reveal it, leading to anguished letters from family members who had been unaware of the prisoner's status.
"Justice Department intervention is a critical step toward achieving equality for prisoners living with HIV in South Carolina," McLemore said. "It is time for South Carolina to adopt prison policies that reflect science and the law, not bigotry and bias."
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( 0 / 0 )In response to a bill sponsored by Asm. Bonnie Lowenthal of Long Beach, the Center for Health Justice, in collaboration with other HIV and healthcare advocates in Los Angeles County drafted the following letter.
Dear Assembly Member Lowenthal:
We write to oppose AB 2590, as amended, which would permit nonconsensual disclosure of HIV+ Californians’ names and contact information to state contractors, such as the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, allowing medical service providers to market their services to this vulnerable population. The Center for Heatlh Justice opposes this unprecedented disclosure of confidential HIV information to facilitate unnecessary and unsolicited contact by an economically interested medical provider at precisely the time when a person recently diagnosed with HIV may be struggling with the many ramifications of the diagnosis.
As amended, AB 2590 will result in the disclosure of previously highly protected confidential medical information of Medi-Cal recipients for the purpose of allowing private entities to market to individuals living with HIV without their consent and in a way that may compromise confidentiality. There is the potential over time that any private HIV medical service providing individual or entity such as AHF could solicit individuals already under appropriate HIV medical care. This is a breach of the physician’s basic code of ethics and may result in interfering with the individual’s medical care. Unwanted medical solicitation including direct contact of potential patients without their consent is prohibited by both state and federal law.
The history of “cold call” marketing of medical services by managed care providers has led to strong regulation of this type of conduct by federal law. 42 U.S.C. § 1396u-2(d)(2)(E); 42 C.F.R. § 438.106(b). This bill is a step in the opposite direction, allowing state contractors of HIV medical services care may disrupt excellent care networks Medi-Cal beneficiaries have already established.
Specifically, with regard to AHF, there is a vested financial interest in being able to recruit patients for medical care and privately funded lucrative medical and pharmaceutical research.
Operationally, this bill will result in a list of HIV+ Californians who are Medi-Cal recipients being shared with people not involved in the individual’s medical care. Even in the best of circumstances, this is likely to result in increased instances of unauthorized disclosures of confidential medical information.
Furthermore, risk of unauthorized disclosure of HIV information undermines public health efforts aimed at encouraging HIV testing and early treatment. Individuals who are fearful of HIV such disclosure may forego testing altogether.
Based on the history of stigma and discrimination associated with HIV and the public health interest in encouraging testing, voluntary disclosure, and seeking appropriate health care, HIV information is highly protected under current California law, and should remain so. As advocates for individuals living with HIV and their rights to confidentiality, we vigorously oppose AB 2950 as an attempt by one entity to unnecessarily change the HIV confidentiality law of California and undermine public health advances in order to facilitate its marketing to HIV+ Medi-Cal clients.
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( 3 / 280 )Next week the legislature will return to deal with the aftermath of the budget agreement. The final state budget anticipates the following savings in the CDCR’s budget:
• $182.1 million by deportation of undocumented state prisoners to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation.
• $175 million by decreasing in the number of programs for parolees. Programs that have been demonstrated to effectively reduce recidivism will be retained. The CDCR will also attempt to achieve this savings through more efficient delivery of programs.
• $147.6 million in “operational savings” by a one-time reduction in facility repairs, headquarter savings, additional efficiencies within the operations of the juvenile programs, and other operational savings.
• $50 million from establishing limits on contract reimbursement rates for medical services.
That’s a total of over $500 million in speculative savings, but it’s just the beginning. An additional $630.8 million will be achieved through various reforms intended to reduce prison and parole populations.
It's going to be interesting, and the political posturing has already begun:
http://blogs.kqed.org/capitalnotes/2009 ... bers-game/
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( 2.9 / 689 )The CDCR is at the center of the problem of government spending, which also means change in it is the solution.
Morning Edition, July 15, 2009 · California is a mess financially, and one of its huge burdens is its prisons.
The state spends $10 billion a year on its prison system, which once was a model for states to follow but now is a model of what to avoid, NPR's Laura Sullivan tells Renee Montagne.
The prison population has grown from 25,000 to 175,000 since the early 1990s, not because of an increase in crime, Sullivan says, but because of the "tough-on-crime, three-strikes-and-you're-out" laws. But the growing population isn't the only prison-related challenge facing the state.
Unions are another factor. The prisons employ 33,000 people, including the nation's highest-paid correctional officers. The unions are a powerful political force, backing ballot measures for longer sentencing and punishment, for example.
Parole and probation represent another complicating factor. California has the country's toughest parole sanctions on the books. Each year the system releases 120,000 parolees, and each year 75,000 return to prison for violating their parole on technical terms, such as missing an appointment with a parole officer.
Texas used to have similar laws but found them too costly. So it slowly stopped returning parolees to prison for technical violations, and now Texas doesn't have the overcrowding and fiscal problems facing California, Sullivan says.
The three-strikes rule has returned as a ballot measure, but voters have not repealed it, she adds.
And yet another challenge is the rising cost of health care.
It all adds up to a vicious cycle that California's prisons can't seem to pull out of: Tough laws mean more prison time, more prison time means overcrowding, and overcrowding means less money for health care and other programs to help rehabilitate people and keep them from coming back to prison.
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