WE ARE not particularly surprised by the decision, announced by the head of the correctional services, Maj. Richard Reese, that there will be no distribution of condoms in prisons, despite last week's strong endorsement of the idea by the Minister of Health, Mr. Horace Dalley.
For while we hoped that it would be otherwise, we always sensed that the administration would play to the politically popular and that in a crunch, Mr. Dalley would quickly fold.
Maybe the Minister of Health will prove us wrong and again take up the issue in a fashion that caused us, in these columns, to come to his support a week ago.
While the public has not been made aware of the official reasons for not distributing condoms in prisons, we expect that the authorities will advance two arguments. One will be something to do with morality, that there are no arrangements for conjugal rights in Jamaican correctional institutions, so no basis for making condoms available. The other will have to do with the fact that buggery remains illegal in Jamaica and that the distribution of condoms in all-male institutions would be an implied invitation to break the law. Perhaps!
There are a number of observations to be made on this matter, not least being the fact that ways can be found to distribute condoms in prison without the process being specifically handled by the correctional authorities, assuming that form is more important than substance. But just as important is the matter of pragmatism in dealing with a serious health issue.
For all the chest-thumping, puffed-up claims to the contrary, men do have sex with each other in prisons, as they do in the rest of the society. In the wider society we preach against people having unprotected sex, lest they place themselves at risk from HIV/AIDS and other sexually-transmitted diseases. But in prisons, we lie to ourselves that it doesn't happen while at-risk inmates contract HIV/AIDS. These same inmates may place even their heterosexual partners at risk, once they are released from prisons and re-enter their 'normal' relationships.
But perhaps the larger travesty and greatest hypocrisy of all this is the maintenance of buggery laws on the books. The truth is that no matter what we think of homosexuals, the state has no place in the bedrooms of consenting adults, unless our legislators want to be voyeurs. It is bad enough for there to be social stigma related to people's sexual preferences, but legal sanctions ought to have no place in a modern, liberal democracy.
Such stigma and the vengeance of the law help to drive underground homosexuals, prostitutes and others who may be at risk with the concomitant danger of accelerating the spread of HIV/AIDS and other diseases among people who fear a backlash if they seek treatment.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
