Published December, 2010

With Dignity and Respect, Power Point, NAPWA, Vanessa Johnson (2010)

These slides explore HIV criminalization, and the potential use of alternatives to incarceration as a way to address the human rights violations represented by arrest and extreme sentencing of people with HIV while acknowledging the experience among some partners, particularly women, of betrayal and a need to confrontation and closure. The presentation uses the 1983 Denver Principles as the foundation for its argument against HIV-specific criminal statutes and prosecutions: the HIV-positive individual's right to fulfilling sexual and emotional lives; along with the ethical (as contrasted with legal) obligation to disclose his/her HIV status to sexual partners.  According to Johnson, alternatives to incarceration might include, for example, mediation clinics, which are a more balanced, cost-efficient, and less stigmatizing approach to addressing the needs of injured partners in alleged cases of HIV and non-disclosure or transmission.