Rubbers Stomped

The city said it would provide prisoners with condoms. Why haven't they?

by Alex C. Pasquariello

health

Prison-health advocate Waheedah Shabazz-El thought last Thursday would be a red-letter day in America's fight against the AIDS epidemic. The previous week, as she participated in the annual meeting of the National Association of People With AIDS (NAPWA) in New Orleans, Philadelphia Prison Commissioner Leon King II e-mailed to assure her that he expected to sign a policy improving access to condoms for more than 8,000 inmates. But when Dec. 14 came and went without an announcement, public health had fallen victim to politics — again.

"This is the second time the implementation of this important public-health policy has been delayed," says Shabazz-El, a 53-year-old retired postal worker turned activist with Philadelphia AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), "and if somebody above [King] is holding it up, well, maybe we need to go above him."

Sex in Philadelphia prisons is forbidden, but the city has allowed inmates to have condoms since 1988, when then-Mayor Goode overruled the city's Prison Review Board and allowed their distribution as part of a progressive AIDS prevention program. To date, only Vermont, New York City, San Francisco, Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles allow condom distribution behind bars, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. But ACT UP says the once-visionary policy is now broken and they have the fix: sanctioning male and female condoms on the commissary list and promoting their use in the inmates' handbook, bilingual posters and an updated educational video shown at intake.

Free condoms are supposed to be supplied to prisoners by the city's AIDS Activities Coordinating Office, which estimates that 8,000 condoms are distributed each year at a cost of around $360; this is a good investment considering the cost of medication to treat HIV can reach $32,000 per year, according to ACT UP. However, interviews with more than 100 of the city's former inmates at Philadelphia's fourth annual Beyond the Walls: Prison Health Care Summit in June revealed significant hurdles to accessing and possessing protection while incarcerated.

DOWN WITH DISEASE: ACT UP's Waheedah Shabazz-El blames prison guards for confiscating condoms that prisoners need behind bars. : Michael T. Regan

Former inmates, both male and female, confirmed the prevalence of sexual contact between prisoners and also between prisoners and guards. ACT UP also learned that prophylactics were distributed without regard to privacy, causing many male inmates to pass them up lest they be branded gay or HIV-positive. Prisoners reported being sent to solitary confinement when guards found condoms in their cells.

"Basically, correctional officers are undermining the policy by confiscating as fast as the AIDS Activities Coordinating Office can hand them out," Shabazz-El says.

ACT UP presented King with their vision for a functional condom policy at meetings in July and August. In October, prison officials responded with a revised policy incorporating almost all of the group's ideas. "Every member of the Philadelphia Prison Review Board had signed off on the policy and all that was left was for Commissioner King to make it official," says ACT UP's Jose DeMarco. "We left that meeting thinking this is a done deal."

It wasn't.

On Nov. 3, prison spokesman Bob Eskind told the Inquirer, "We are still reviewing the policy." King didn't return calls for this article, but Eskind reiterated that stance on Friday.

"The goal is to get a policy that sends a clear message to prisoners and guards that condoms are an important health resource tool, not contraband," says DeMarco, who compares it to needle-exchange programs. "Philadelphia has an opportunity to be a leader on this issue ... and our campaign will continue until the policy is signed."

Shabazz-El, who was diagnosed HIV-positive in 2003 while serving six months on drug charges, admits it might be time for a tactical shift. "Sometimes to get direct action, you have to embarrass somebody," she says, referring to the unruly protest tactics that have established ACT UP as a powerful lobby in the development of national and international health policy.

Noting the high rate of infection within African-American communities — just 13 percent of the overall population, blacks represent some 47 percent of the 1.1 million HIV-infected Americans — Shabazz-El says, "Our prisons, like it or not, have become primary health-care providers to our husbands and fathers, wives and mothers, brothers and sisters, and condoms are scientifically proven to be the first and cheapest defense against this disease ravaging our communities."

(a_pasquariello@citypaper.net)