Corrections wonk Sara Mayeux is stunned over the conservative blogosphere's embrace of South Carolina's draconian policy of segregating HIV-positive inmates from the general population, which not only violates medical privacy rights but practically treats being HIV-positive as a de-facto crime in and of itself. As I wrote yesterday, the policy of segregating HIV-positive prisoners isn't some vanguard policy innovation, it's a throwback to the days when Americans knew little about AIDS. Not only does the World Health Organization disapprove of this type of policy, but only two of the 48 state and federal prison jurisdictions that had such policies in 1985 still retain them. Nevertheless, this was the reaction over at the Daily Caller:
That's some trenchant policy analysis. Nothing says "individual liberty" like forced medical testing, involuntary quarantine, and making your medical information public knowledge. Either 48 states in the union also "want you to get AIDS and die" or South Carolina's policy is very possibly cruel and unusual.
Mayeux is still trying to sort out the spin from the facts, particularly the idiotic notion that the Civil Rights Division's potential lawsuit challenging South Carolina's prisoner segregation policy would permanently end treatment for HIV-positive prisoners in South Carolina prisoners, but as far as the conservative media is concerned she's fighting a losing battle. If the Justice Department were suing GM for developing a car engine that ran solely on the flesh of baby kittens, they'd be attacking the administration for being unwilling to reduce U.S. dependence on foreign oil.
They aren't latching on to this because they've suddenly developed an interest in humane corrections policy; they're latching on to it as a knee-jerk reaction to the Obama administration's Justice Department, which they're willing to smear at any cost, even if it means embracing morally reprehensible policy the rest of the country has left behind. They're not particularly interested in being accurate.
Ironically, there is a matter of prison policy on which the Obama administration has been dragging their feet (which RedState's Moe Lane mentioned) despite the protestations of Republican Frank Wolf and Democrat Bobby Scott -- the issue of prison rape. As Amanda Hess noted at the time, Attorney General Eric Holder missed his deadline for finalizing national standards for prisons to address rape prevention. As Mayeux writes," If pundits are looking for a real scandal in the Obama Department of Justice, it’s this: Holder’s foot-dragging on adopting standards that could sharply curtail the incidence of prison rape nationwide."
