HIV TESTING IN THE PRISONS

Re: "Prison's hidden threat," editorial, Jan. 31

AIDS Project Los Angeles and other state and national HIV/AIDS
advocacy groups have been working for several years to help
legislators -- including Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) -- craft
thoughtful bills to address HIV/AIDS in prisons. These efforts would
ensure that inmates get not only HIV testing but the medical care,
drug treatments and prevention tools they need, including condoms.
Too often, proposed legislation has targeted the prison population as
a vector of new HIV infection when available research, such as the
Georgia Corrections study you cite, indicates that a majority of
infected inmates are HIV-positive when they enter the corrections system.

Testing inmates should help combat HIV/AIDS behind bars. But if we
want to reduce the alarming HIV infection rates now being reported in
communities of color, we will have to provide these communities with
the same level of resources -- HIV and STD testing, care, treatment
and prevention -- on the outside that Waters' bill would provide in
the prisons.

CRAIG E. THOMPSON

Executive Director, AIDS Project Los Angeles