“But with HIV, It's Turned a Lot of Them into Death Camps”: Prisoners Responses to HIV/AIDS, 1981–99

In June 1981 the Center for Disease Control released its first reports on a mysterious disease that caused five gay men to die from pneumonia complications. A year later, the Angolite Newsmagazine—the award-winning magazine produced by prisoners at Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola—wrote its first of many articles about "The Unknown Killer," soon to be named Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome or AIDS. The incarcerated writers knew they were most vulnerable for a syndrome that would extend "far beyond the gay population."

Prisoners across the country were anxious about HIV/AIDS behind bars. Particularly at the intersections of violence—physical and sexual assault, drug use, etc.—and began campaigns throughout the 1980s and 1990s to protect themselves from contraction. This paper seeks to interrogate the ways incarcerated people navigated the first decades of the pandemic around the country. Using prison newspapers and magazines, private letters, interviews, legal and governmental documents, I engage the ways prisoners—both with and without AIDS—advocated for themselves and made life, and death, more difficult for each other behind bars. I hope to illuminate how those behind bars resisted a carceral system that produced AIDS "death camps," by focusing on the ways incarcerated people described their experiences, concerns, and critiques of prison officials and institutions.