News

Bars are no protection

Despite pouring millions of pounds into advertisements aimed at educating people to the risk of AIDs, the government is steadfastly refusing to sanction cheap and effective measures to protect prisoners from HIV infection.

The Home Office has remained unmoved by protests outside prison and pleas by eminent bodies that prisoners be issued with condoms and, if they are drug abusers, clean syringes.

A Home Office spokesman told healthmatters that ‘syringes and condoms will not be distributed to prisoners’.

The Home Office claims that there are ‘only’ 57 HIV infected prisoners in British jails. But the National Association of Probation Offices puts the number at 10 times that.

One of the protesters involved in a demonstration outside Pentonville Prison recently said: ‘It seems as if the government is saying that some people’s lives are less valuable than others. And prisoners are definitely in its “less valuable” category’.

The British Medical Association (BMA) has also thrown its weight behind the call for issuing condoms in prison.

BMA Scottish secretary Dr Andrew Vallance Owen said: ‘We are very keen on giving condoms to prisoners.’ He said that it was BMA policy north and south of the border.

The Home Office is currently making a video on the dangers of AIDS, which will be shown in all prisons. But its refusal to allow the cheap and effective step of issuing condoms and syringes in prisons suggests it is not prepared to face up to what it thinks is a moral problem.

In the meantime the risk to prisoners of being infected with, and spreading, HIV continues.