Search results
You are looking at 1 - 1 of 1 items for
- Author: Janet Weston x
- Refine by access: User-accessible content x
As the AIDS crisis emerged, prisons were quickly identified as possible
‘reservoirs of infection’, where injecting drug use, sex between men,
violence, and poor hygiene might all contribute towards the spread of HIV.
Some countries moved to introduce punitive or restrictive measures within
their prisons, while researchers and international bodies hastened to
promote an alternative approach, based on voluntarism, education, and harm
reduction. This tried to acknowledge prisoners’ rights and to position
prisons as an integral part of the wider community, and by the early 1990s
some regions saw innovations such as methadone treatment and needle
exchanges established within their prisons.
This chapter reviews and
begins to explain the different ways in which countries around Europe
responded to HIV/AIDS in their prison systems. The size of a nation’s prison
population and the extent of injecting drug use were both important factors
in determining national response, as were pre-existing structures of prison
healthcare provision and attitudes towards both homosexuality and crime.
Responses in prisons were also closely affiliated to responses in the wider
community – perhaps to a greater extent than campaigners calling for greater
parity were prepared to recognise. It then compares policies and
developments in the Republic of Ireland and Switzerland to explore different
forms of activism, with different outcomes. Using international evaluations
and research from the 1980s and 1990s, national policy documents, and oral
histories, this chapter also raises questions about the kind of activism
surrounding HIV/AIDS that is remembered.