ABSTRACT
The significance of prisons in the progress of the HIV pandemic has been widely acknowledged over recent years. Prisons contain a high population of people who may be particularly at risk of contracting HIV through the injection of drugs, and through participation in high risk sexual activity whilst in prison. In his address to the first world AIDS Summit in 1987, Sir Donald Acheson, who was the government’s Chief Medical Officer, expressed the fear that prisons would form a bridge for the spread of HIV into the wider community. It is in these terms, the risk of HIV spreading to ‘innocent’ contacts of people released from prison, that the importance of prisons has usually been discussed. But this begs the question of the basic needs of those in prison to keep themselves safe, to have access to a good standard of medical care, to confidentiality and to a reasonable quality of life. Without addressing these basic needs the rhetoric about prisons as vehicles for the spread of the virus becomes nothing more than superficial scaremongering likely to stigmatise people with HIV infection in prisons yet further.
