Rebecca Jurado, attorney with the ACLU’s Prison Rights Project

“My name is Rebecca Jurado and for the past seven and a half years I have been director of the Women Prisoners Rights Project for the ACLU Foundation of Southern California. The purpose of the project is to advocate on behalf of women prisoners. I specifically dealt with the California Institution for Women, which is as far as we know the largest prison in the free world. The issues that we’ve dealt with include: medical care, quality of medical care, access to programs, conditions of confinement, segregation policies and most recently policies with regard to HIV infected womenh prisoners, both in terms of adequacy of medical care and their access to programs.

...What we always hope to accomplish in terms of our advocacy on behalf of women prisoners; one is to educate the Department of Corrections with regard to the errors in their policy, educate the public with regard to the rights of prisoners, and the bottom line is to provide a particular group of prisoners with the rights that they have coming to them, not to create new rights, but to insure that existing rights are implemented and respected.

With regard to women who are HIV positive, there’s a whole...there’s several categories of problems that they’re dealing with. First is an issue of adequate medical care; between 1984 and 1989, the women did not have an HIV specialist on staff. To date they have no HIV specialist who is treating them who is expert in the area of wome and HIV. So adequate medical care is one. Another one is the violation of the right to privacy. By the Department of Corrections policy to segregate anyone who is HIV positive and place them in a separate unit, their right to privacy with regard to medical status is just violated.

...With regard to the impact of segregation and the other issues....the impact on women is compounded. If you don’t have adequate medical care, it means that your life is at risk in terms of prevention, in terms of treatment. Seeing this because you are segregated, you watch other women who are further alon die and not receive treatment and you see yourself going, ‘That is going to be me in three or four months.’”