Raymond Harris
Professor Ira Falls
English 102
23 February, 09

“Should Condoms be administered in Jail?”
Despite the harsh rules banning sexual activity along with any kind of activity for that matter in prisons, HIV is a growing threat to inmates and will become a larger issue once they are released back into the world. Though there are obvious differences between the two scenarios, distributing condoms in prison looks to hit the same roadblocks as condoms in High Schools. The first issue is that prevention in prison starts far before a condom enters the equation. The very concept of “safe sex” is dependent upon the partners being consensual and the most readily available allusion to Prison Sex is, of course, rape a kind of “sex” that won’t ever be safe. In reality, much of the high-risk homosexual contact in prison involves men who do not consider themselves gay outside prison, former prisoners and researchers said. About 1 percent of prisoners report being raped. From a health standpoint, it is not much different from inoculation against disease. If we are already using medical means to protect inmates from contagious illness, how are government-sponsored condoms a stretch? However, of course, there are those annoying moral issues. As if gay inmate sex was not enough to make the conservatives grumble in the first place, the idea of combining it with prophylactics. Is this the worst idea ever thought of? Violence is also against the rules in jail and we all see how effective it is as a deterrent. They put offenders into solitary confinement, so why not isolate those with STDs or HIV in their own separate wing. This seems unlikely as our prisons are swelling past capacity by the hour. The only choice the penal establishment has with sex is the length of the consequences. There are many aspects of prison a man will live with for the rest of his