Effectiveness of Interventions to Manage HIV in Prisons—Provision of Condoms and Other Measures to Decrease Sexual Transmission

This paper, jointly authored by the WHO, UNAIDS, and the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, discusses the reality of life in correctional settings and asserts that distribution of condoms is necessary to help stop the sexual transmission of HIV in those settings. According to the paper, “various countries have introduced HIV programmes in prisons. However, many of them are small in scale, restricted to a few prisons, or exclude necessary interventions for which evidence of effectiveness exists. There is an urgent need to introduce comprehensive programmes, (including information and education, particularly through peers; needle and syringe programmes; drug dependence treatment, in particular opioid substitution therapy with methadone and/or buprenorphine; voluntary counselling and HIV testing; and HIV care and support, including provision of antiretroviral treatment) and to scale them up rapidly. As part of these programmes, prison systems should make condoms accessible to prisoners.” The paper has an international focus, but the concepts are broadly applicable in U.S.