Mass incarceration accelerating spread of HIV among Blacks
1st August 2016 · 0 Comments
By George E. Curry
Contributing Writer
DURBAN, South Africa (Special from EmergeNewsOn-line.com) — Efforts to halt the spread of HIV among African Americans, the most impacted group in the United States, will not be successful without reducing the rate of mass incarceration among people of color, according to research made public here Tuesday at the International AIDS Conference.
One of the researchers, Dr. Chris Beyrer, president of the International AIDS Society and Desmond M. Tutu Professor of Public Health and Human Rights at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, told a media delegation from the Black AIDS Institute:
“Black women in the U.S., if you look at their individual level of sexual risk, are less risky than Latino or even white women. And they have more than five times the infection rate. So how do we understand that? It turns out that the mass incarceration of African-American men is fundamental this and it’s because of this problem of lack of access to care.”
The United States warehouses more prisoners than any country in the world, with five percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of its prisoners. There are 2.2 million people in U.S. prisons and jails — a 500 percent increase over the past 40 years.
“Today, people of color make up 37% of the U.S. population but 67 percent of the prison population,” according to the Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that works for a fair and effective U.S. criminal justice system by promoting reforms in sentencing policy, addressing unjust racial disparities and practices, and advocating for alternatives to incarceration. “Overall, African Americans are more likely than white Americans to be arrested; once arrested, they are more likely to be convicted; and once convicted, they are more likely to face stiff sentences. Black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men and Hispanic men are more than twice as likely to be incarcerated as non-Hispanic white men.”
At a news conference last week, Dr. Beyrer said Blacks and whites in the U.S. have similar drug use rates, but Blacks are incarcerated more because of discriminatory policies.
The so-called “War on Drugs” is a case in point.
For more than two decades, the ratio of the amount of powder cocaine needed to trigger the same federal prison sentence as an amount of crack cocaine was 100:1, even though there is no pharmacological difference between crack and powder cocaine.
Because African Americans make up 80 percent of those sentenced under federal crack cocaine laws each year, the disparity in sentencing laws led to harsher sentences for Blacks than those for whites possessing powder cocaine.
“Furthermore, harsher sentencing laws such as mandatory minimums keep drug offenders in prison for longer periods of time,” the Sentencing Project stated. “In 1986, released drug offenders had spent an average of 22 months in federal prison. By 2004, federal drug offenders were expected to serve almost three times that length: 62 months in prison.”
The Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 reduced the crack/cocaine sentencing disparity to 18:1, but that was not applied retroactively.
From 1999-2005, African American constituted roughly an average of 13 percent of drug — their approximate proportion of the U.S. population — but 36 percent of those arrested for drug offenses and 46 percent of those convicted for drug offenses, according to federal prison figures.
Black women are the fastest-growing segment of the prison population.
“We did this assessment worldwide, there are about 700,000 women worldwide in prisons; 205,000 are Americans. So no one is incarcerating women more than the U.S. and that is hugely disproportionately women of color,” said Dr. Beyrer, co-chair of the 2016 International AIDS Conference.
Black women are imprisoned more than twice the rate of white women, 109 per 100,000, compared to 53 per 100,000 for white women. Latina women are locked up at a rate of 64 per 100,000.
For men, the gap is even wider, with white men imprisoned at a rate of 465 per 100,000 and African-American men an astounding 2,724 per 100,000, according to the Sentencing Project. The Latino men rate is 1,091 per 100,000,
The research released at the AIDS conference here was summarized in a series of six articles in The Lancet, a British medical journal, on HIV and related infections in prisoners.
A commentary accompanying the six articles observed, “The spike in HIV/AIDS rates among Black women seems to be due primarily to their increased risk of having an infected partner. The CDC estimates that 87 percent of African-American women with HIV become infected through heterosexual sex, and only a small percentage through injection drug use or other pathways.
“Incarceration rates have quadrupled in the USA in the past several decades, and this has reduced the number of men in Black communities, and therefore the number of available partners for heterosexual Black women. This fact, together with ongoing racial segregation, contributes to the formation of insular sexual networks with overlapping concurrent partners.”
That is consistent with research conducted by Dr. Adaora A. Adimora, a professor at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine who has conducted research on heterosexual HIV transmission rates escalating in the southeast, especially among Black women.
She attributed much of that growth to the prevalence of concurrent or overlapping sexual partnerships.
Adimora and two other researchers, Victor J. Schoenbach and Irene A. Doherty, wrote in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndromes: “Recent studies suggest that there are differences between Blacks and whites in types of sexual network mixing patterns and prevalence of concurrency… African Americans with only one partner in the past year are five times as likely as whites to choose sexual partners from the core (persons who have had at least four partners in the past year).”
In addition, they said, “STIs tend to remain within the Black population because their partner choices are more segregated; Blacks more often than other ethnic/racial groups tend to choose African Americans as partners.”
In an article published in The Journal of American Sexually Transmitted Diseases, the authors explained, “Once a concurrent partner acquires infection, transmission to a third person can occur without the delay involved with ending the first relationship and beginning the next. In addition, because relationships overlap in time, early partners are no more protected from infection than those acquired later. Thus, concurrency permits faster transmission of infection through a network than do sequential partnerships acquired at the same rate and has emerged as a particularly important factor in population HIV transmission.
“The prevalence of concurrent partnerships influences both the rate of the epidemic’s spread in its initial phase and the number of persons who are infected at a later time period. Concurrency particularly enhances population spread of HIV because of the virus’ long duration of infectiousness.”
In an interview, Olive Shisana, local co-chair of the International AIDS convention, said women who are serially monogamous are at great risk.
“It becomes very clear as we look at the data that when you are single you are likely to have one monogamous partner for some time, then when that relationship ends, you start another relationship,” she explained. “The number of relationships that you’ve had determines the lifetime risk of you getting infected with HIV, so your probability is much higher as you change partners over time. I’m not even talking about multiple sexual partnerships, I’m just talking about serial monogamy — being single and have successive different relationships. It does put one at risk of HIV.”
There is increasing public recognition that that imprisonment of an individual impacts far more than the person serving time.
According to the Sentencing Project, in 2004, 52 percent of the people in state prisons and 63 percent of federal prisoners were parents of minor children. In 2007, 1.7 million children had a parent in prison on any given day. Black children are 7.5 times more likely and Latino children are 2.6 times more likely than white children to have a parent in prison.
Even after they are released, their prison past still punishes many former inmates. Among the impediments:
• The Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997
• (AFSA) permits the termination of parental rights when a child has been in foster care for 15 of the previous 22 months;
• The Welfare Reform Act of 1996 permanently denies welfare benefits (TANF) and food stamps to anyone convicted of felony drug crimes;
• The Housing Opportunity Program Extension Act allows local officials to deny public housing, Section 8, and other federally assisted housing to anyone convicted of a drug-related or violent crime; and
• The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 makes prisoners ineligible for college Pell grants. They can re-gain eligibility for Pell Grants and federal financial aid upon release if they have not been convicted of a drug-related offense.
The commentary declared, “To reduce HIV/AIDS rates among African Americans we need to focus on structural factors, such as reducing incarceration rates and improving access to health care.”
This article originally published in the August 1, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
