Sara Mayeux notes that South Carolina is likely to miss its deadline for changing its draconian policy of segregating HIV positive prisoners from the general population, meaning that the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division is likely to file suit.
I just want to reiterate again that South Carolina is one of two states that still do this. Segregating HIV positive prisoners in this fashion is basically treating having HIV as though it's a crime in and of itself. It violates the privacy of inmates by disclosing their HIV status publicly, it means that the convicted are placed in a maximum-security facility regardless of the severity of their crime, and it hampers their chances for early release by cutting off programs inmates in other facilities have access to. In 1985, 48 state and federal prison jurisdictions segregated HIV-positive prisoners. Now only South Carolina and Alabama do it.
Conservatives have recently tried to treat the segregation of HIV-positive prisoners as some kind of policy innovation in order to smear the Obama administration, but it's really just a cruel policy left over from the days when Americans knew virtually nothing about AIDS and HIV.
