Jail Condoms Draw Fire In U.S., Namibia

AIDS activists blame a law banning male-to-male sex for preventing condom distribution and HIV-prevention efforts in Namibia's prisons, South Africa's Mail & Guardian paper has reported. Advocates for condom distribution have run into opposition from government officials who see their efforts as promoting homosexual activity, citing a 30-year old law banning sex between men.
"By giving (prisoners) a condom, you are telling them to go ahead and do it," Ignatius Mainga, a spokesman for Namibia's ministry of safety and security, told the paper. But Michaela Hubscle, former deputy minister of the Ministry of Prisons and Correctional Services, insisted that condom distribution is key to preventing an HIV "time bomb."
Correctional facilities are a key front in halting the spread of HIV in the impoverished southern African country -- where statistics show that nearly 20 percent of the nation is infected -- but attitudes about same-sex activity are hindering that effort, according to HIV prevention activists.
In the United States, HIV prevention advocates see strong similarities to their fight to distribute condoms in correctional facilities.
Julie Davids, executive director of CHAMP, a New York-based community HIV/AIDS mobilization project, said that, unlike in most correctional facilities abroad, programs like condom distribution are unavailable in the vast majority of U.S. jails and prisons.
"(Correctional facilities) in the U.S. say the same things they say in Namibia -- that condoms will condone sex and increase prisoner rape," she told the PlanetOut Network. "But if they really wanted to prevent prison rape, there are a lot of things they can do and aren't." Davids pointed to the Prison Rape Elimination Act passed by Congress last year, but rarely implemented due to lack of accountability across a wide variety of state, federal and municipal correctional systems.
The federal government estimates that about 30 percent of federal male prison inmates engage in sex acts -- consensual or not -- with other male inmates. However, most correctional facilities do not track incidents of sex.
Nor is the success in preventing HIV through condom distribution well documented. Only a few cities and states, such as Philadelphia, New York City, Vermont and Mississippi, allow condom distribution, and none has statistics on its effectiveness.
HIV prevention is the impetus behind a bill in the California Legislature that would allow nonprofit or public health organizations to distribute condoms, dental dams and "other sex-related protective devices" to California's 162,000 prison inmates. Under the bill authored by Assembly members Paul Koretz, D-West Hollywood, and Jackie Goldberg, D-Los Angeles, the state Department of Corrections would be required to develop a plan for the disposal of used devices that "protects the anonymity of inmates and protects the health of correctional officers."
The bill's opponents, such as Benjamin Lopez of the Traditional Values Coalition, who called the bill "obscene, disgusting and absurd," say condoms would give inmates permission to engage in illegal activity. Sex -- forced or consensual -- is illegal in California correctional facilities and throughout the United States.
Nevertheless, the bill passed the Assembly, the more conservative of California's two legislative houses, in May 2005, and is now in the appropriations committee of the state Senate. A spokesman for Koretz told the PlanetOut Network that the assemblyman would make its passage a priority this year.
Even if the California bill passes, the United States will still lag far behind Canada, Western Europe and Latin America in implementing programs to stop AIDS in prisons.
"This country needs to stop putting up obstacles to HIV prevention," Davids said. "Condom distribution is common sense and should be part of a continuity of care, both inside and outside of prison and part of a whole range of harm-reduction programs."
from Planet Out