A recent plan in the Chinese government seeks to test prisoners for HIV and segregate inmates positive for the disease. While China’s proportionally low (about one in 2000, reports the April 19th article “Double Jeopardy” in The Economist) “internal migrations to cities and an associated boom in prostitution” have HIV infections rising at 11% a year. Odd incidents of “HIV/AIDS crime,” such as holdups with “blood-filled AIDS syringes,” precipitate the government’s worries about AIDS and lead to plans like prisoner-segregation, with fears and misperceptions about HIV/AIDS threatening to overlook “education, voluntary testing and easy access to treatment and means of protection” for segregation, which is used to some extent in the United States as well, but which was rejected as an ineffective strategy by the United Nations in 2006.
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