This Witness Seminar, held at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in May 2017, brings together some of those involved in influencing and implementing prison policy decisions surrounding HIV and AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s.
AIDS first appeared in Europe in the early 1980s, and prisons were soon identified as sites that would face particular challenges. Injecting drug use was one of the primary modes of HIV transmission, and the large numbers of drug users passing through prisons meant that the prevalence of HIV was feared to be high. Added to this were suspicions about the frequency of risky sexual activity and injecting drug use within prisons. Prisoners were not only thought to be at a higher risk of already having HIV or AIDS, but prisons themselves were seen as an ideal environment for the spread of infection amongst inmates, potentially also from inmates to staff, and ultimately from released prisoners to the wider population. Urgent decisions had to be made about how to minimise disruptions prompted by diagnoses or fears of HIV and AIDS, how to reduce the risks of HIV transmission, and how to look after prisoners already affected.
The emergence of HIV and AIDS highlighted many of the existing tensions and problems surrounding healthcare for prisoners. Witnesses described the reluctance of the prison service to acknowledge and tackle difficult issues, but also observed that there did not seem to have been an HIV or AIDS epidemic within prisons in England and Wales. What also emerged was a sense of some of the ongoing difficulties facing the prison service, in terms of lost gains in healthcare services, mounting overcrowding, and a failure to learn the lessons of the past.
Includes full transcript, introduction, and suggestions for further reading.
First published by the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, 2017
Funded by the Wellcome Trust, Investigator Award number 103341
Suggested citation:
Janet Weston and Virginia Berridge (eds), HIV/AIDS and the Prison Service of England & Wales, 1980s-1990s: transcript of a witness seminar (London: London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, 2017)
The transcript of a witness seminar held by the Centre for History in Public Health, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, 18 May 2017
Other Witness Seminars from the Centre for History in Public Health
Transcripts are available from www.history.lshtm.ac.uk
The Resource Allocation Working Party and the NHS: Origins, Implementation and Development, 1974-1990, 21 November 2013; jointly with the Institute for Contemporary British History at King’s College London
The Tomlinson Report and After: Reshaping London’s Health Services 1992-1997
Nutrition and History in the Twentieth Century, 15th September 2010
The Griffiths NHS Management Inquiry, 11 November 2008
The Big Smoke: Fifty Years After The 1952 London Smog, 10 December 2002
Epidemiology, Social Medicine and Public Health, 21 July 2000
The Black Report and The Health Divide Black report, 19 April 1999
