• DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(16)31078-9
• Corpus ID: 38094336

US prisons missing opportunities to tackle HIV in inmates

@article{Rubin2016USPM,
  title={US prisons missing opportunities to tackle HIV in inmates},
  author={Rita Carey Rubin},
  journal={The Lancet},
  year={2016},
  volume={388},
  pages={1041-1042}
}

• R. Rubin
• Published 10 September 2016
• Medicine
• The Lancet

The USA imprisons a larger per centage of its population than any other country in the world except the Seychelles, and its inmates are at least three times more likely to have HIV/AIDS than the general US population. “In almost any jurisdiction in the US, there’s a concentration of the epidemic in the correctional population”, Anne Spaulding, an infectious disease specialist who directs the Center for the Health of Incarcerated Persons at Emory University, GA, USA, told The Lancet. Worldwide, 144 out of every 100 000 people are in prison, according to the World Prison Population List, published by the Institute for Criminal Policy Research, London, UK. In the USA, however, the rate is nearly fi ve times higher than that, with 698 prisoners per 100 000 people. The Seychelles’ rate is 799 per 100 000 people, but the country’s entire population is only about 90 000. US state and federal prisons held more than 1·5 million people in 2012, while local jails held at least 730 000 more, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). And around 1·5% of inmates in those facilities had HIV/AIDS, compared with about 0·5% of the general US population. Most inmates are infected before they are incarcerated, although they might not know it. According to one estimate, one in seven of all HIV-positive individuals in the USA pass through jails and prisons each year. They are disproportionately black or members of sexual minorities or both and are likely to have comorbidities such as psychiatric illnesses and substance abuse.