The prison service is breaking its own guidelines on the treatment of HIV-positive prisoners, reports Mark Gevisser
WHEN the kitchen staff of Johannesburg Prison were told, in September last year, that blood would be taken from them as part of a routine annual medical checkup, “Gerrit” thought nothing of it. Two weeks later, he was told he was HIV- positive and moved to a single cell in the prison hospital.
There he was left for over a month: he testified in court that he spent 23 out of 24 hours a day in isolation, without recreation, exercise or medical examinations.
This was to last a year. Once Gerrit — a 30-year-old white man convicted of fraud — was moved from the hospital cell, he found himself in segregated HIV units for the rest of his prison days, first at Johannesburg Prison and then at Pretoria Local. He says he was denied recreation or the opportunity to work, and was refused permission to visit the HIV clinic at Johannesburg Hospital.
Two months ago, Gerrit was released under correctional supervision. In his year in the HIV cells of the two prisons, he claims he was not given proper counselling.
When he and his fellow prisoners complained about the food they were being given at Johannesburg Prison, they were told by a senior warden, in front of the kitchen: “You are Aids people. You are going to die. Why should we worry about you?” He says they were constantly intimidated and verbally abused by certain wardens and forbidden contact with other prisoners.
Gerrit says the pots of food brought up to their cells were marked “HIV”; a soccer ball requested by the HIV prisoners arrived with the note, “Recreational Needs for HIV Prisoners”.
Gerrit’s story raises two critical issues: should prisoners be tested for HIV as a matter of course, and should they be isolated if they test positive?
The Aids Law Project at Wits University has launched a campaign calling for an end to isolation and testing without informed consent.
But prisons head of nursing services, Colonel Chris Basson, counters that “there has never been testing without informed consent in our prisons”. While he admits that it is policy to isolate prisoners with HIV at night, he says there is complete integration during the day, and they are not denied access to recreation or work.
This contradicts information received by the Weekly Mail & Guardian, from inmates at the Johannesburg, Krugersdorp and Pretoria prisons, who claim that prisoners with HIV are kept in near-total isolation, and that many inmates were tested without their prior knowledge or consent.
While Basson acknowledges that South Africa’s isolation policies are out of step with the rest of the world, he is firm that night-time isolation will continue: “We have a responsibility towards both infected and non-infected prisoners. In prison, sexual practices do occur, as there are homosexual people who will try to practice sodomy. Prisons are also violent places, and there is always a lot of blood, and a lot of people in close contact due to the communal cells. So we have no option but to separate.”
The human rights lobby counters that not only are prisoners’ human rights being violated, but that the policy of isolation does not serve the interests of public health. It is not possible to isolate all prisoners with HIV, they say, unless Correctional Services tests every single inmate and repeats the tests every six months.
Aids Law Project manager Zackie Achmat slams the policy as “unworkable and short-sighted”. By segregating prisoners, he says, “you are automatically informing the rest of the prison that they are HIV-positive — and thus breaching the confidentiality that the official policy now guarantees them, with no tangible results other than stigmatisation”.
The head of the Cape Town Aids Centre, Geoffrey Taylor, says Correctional Services used to test incoming prisoners from perceived “high-risk” groups — homosexuals, foreigners, drug-users — as well as all kitchen workers. This practice has stopped and the department’s new policy, operative since June, requires written consent and pre-test counselling before HIV testingxxx can take place.