- WEST PALM BEACH
- Pointing to a jagged scar on his forehead, Charles Johnson explains how
he tried to fight off his cellmate during his most recent stay in the Palm
Beach County jail.
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- Night after night, when the lights went out, the inmate
was on him, demanding sex.
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- "After a while, I gave in, because it's a never-ending
fight, and I knew I couldn't win it," said Johnson, 36, a convicted
drug dealer with crimes dating back to 1987.
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- Despite repeated attacks, Johnson, of Lake Worth, has
never taken a test for HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
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- If he's positive, Johnson said, "I don't want to
know."
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- The former prisoner's attitude may be short-sighted.
But it's shared by many in jail.
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- Although health care workers say jails and prisons are
a known transfer point for HIV, Florida prison officials are reluctant
to screen because of the high cost of HIV-fighting drugs. Even so, they
don't distribute the condoms that might prevent HIV's spread.
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- Because inmates so frequently return to the outside world,
health workers say, a major opportunity to slow the epidemic is being wasted.
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- Left undetected, sick inmates are likely to pass disease
to each other and in turn carry AIDS, hepatitis, chlamydia and syphilis
back into their communities. One in three hepatitis C cases in the United
States occur in people who spent time in prisons and jails, said Dr. Anne
DeGroot, a physician who runs the HIV Prison Project at Brown University.
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- The implications are "huge," DeGroot said.
"If you don't provide care to those people, if you don't provide education,
it really is a problem. People do not stay in corrections forever."
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- In Florida, prisons and jails test for HIV only if an
inmate falls ill or asks for a test. Even so, a recently released survey
showed that one in 10 inmates at the Palm Beach County Jail - 274 prisoners
- were HIV positive or showing symptoms of AIDS. Meanwhile, 80 inmates
were sick with full-blown AIDS in the Broward County jail system, and 130
were sick with it in the Miami-Dade County jail system. Broward and Miami-Dade
counties declined to provide the number of HIV-positive inmates, listing
only those inmates so sick that they had full- blown AIDS.
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- The survey, released last month by the U.S. Bureau of
Justice Statistics, counted prisoners on a single day - June 30, 1999.
The figures were reported by jail officials based on known HIV and AIDS
cases.
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- The reported figures are "absolutely the tip of
the iceberg," said Dr. Frederick L. Altice, director of the HIV in
Prisons Project at Yale University.
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- "If you have 10 percent who are known to be positive,
you can count on it being more like 16 to 20 percent."
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- Nationally, scientists know that about 17 percent of
people who have HIV were in a correctional facility in the previous year,
said Hugh Potter, a researcher at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention.
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- As HIV increases in jails, so do budgets for inmate health
care. The Broward County jail system expects its health budget to rise
to $14.2 million next year, up from $13.4 million. In Palm Beach County,
HIV medications alone will cost $500,000 next year, a cost expected to
reach $1 million in 2002.
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- http://braden.infi.net/content/bradenton/2001/08/16/local/0816prison_hiv_11c.htm
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