Cajetan Luna, Executive Director

Cajetan Luna
Introduction: Film (“HIV Is Not A Crime”)

Good morning. I am Cajetan Luna Executive Director of the Center for Health Justice— Our agency provides educational and case management services to men and women living with HIV/AIDS in Los Angeles County Jails.

HIV/AIDS has been one of the preeminent health challenges facing developing and developed countries for over 30 years. All too often, the focus was on data – the numbers of people infected each year, the annual numbers of AIDS-related deaths, the billions that have been spent on research, treatment, and prevention and education programs.

With all of the focus on numbers and costs, it is easy to forget the human and humane dimensions. Human Immunodeficiency Virus is about humans– about the people – men, women and children – impacted by the virus, and by the laws designed to address and control HIV disease.

At this time, we’d like to share with you a short film that gives a compelling view of the human side of the HIV-criminalization issue. You’ll hear the stories of men and women who have been convicted for violating HIV-specific laws. They will tell you, in their own words, the ordeals they’ve had to endure, and the challenges they face.

The film is titled “HIV Is Not A Crime.” It was produced last year by the SERO Project, one the Community Partners that organized today’s event.

To see the film go to www.seroproject.com

For information about future activities on this topic contact the Forum Organizer: Charles McWells at charlesmcwells@yahoo.com

The men she dated offered an escape from life with her overprotective grandmother, who raised her from the age of 5. “They had to be from the streets; they couldn’t be a square,” Jackson said. “I had to have some excitement.”

The excitement ground to a halt in 1998 when she received a letter from her then-boyfriend, who was in prison for drug possession. He was HIV-positive, he wrote. Jackson had tested negative before the relationship began. Her next test came back positive.

Until that day, Jackson thought only three types of people contracted HIV: gay men, injection drug users and people who slept around. She wasn’t any of those, so hadn’t thought herself to be at serious risk. But suddenly she was HIV-positive at age 26, and the virus had come from someone she trusted.

Now 40, Jackson considers HIV education her calling. For the last five years, she has worked with the Los Angeles-based Center for Health Justice, where she directs Project HOME Los Angeles. The program, whose name stands for Healthy Options Means Empowerment, serves women whose male partners are behind bars or have a history of incarceration. It teaches them how to become peer educators for the other women in their lives.

Jackson trains women in strategies to protect their physical health from sexually transmitted infections and to manage their emotional health and build better relationships. Self-esteem is not just a feel-good buzzword, it’s a key tool in HIV prevention, Jackson said. “If a woman is not emotionally balanced, then she would find herself making unhealthy choices which will increase her risk for acquiring HIV.”

Over the last three years, Jackson has guided 307 women through the program. Like her, many are black, facing one of the highest risks for acquiring HIV. Black people make up 12% of the U.S. population but account for nearly half the nation’s HIV cases and almost half of new infections. In 2009, black women accounted for 64% of new HIV diagnoses among women.

Prisons and jails are also an important front in the fight against HIV and AIDS. William Cunningham, a professor of medicine and public health at UCLA, described jails as a revolving door between the criminal justice system and the community. A small percentage of inmates may contract HIV in jail or prison, but most face a greater risk of acquiring the disease through their behavior on the outside, Cunningham said.

When inmates get released, “one of their highest priorities is to resume relationships,” Cunningham said. “High-risk sexual activity along with substance use is a volatile combination that increases the risk of transmission to the community.”

Women in relationships with inmates may face additional risk. If her partner in prison was the breadwinner, a woman may feel strapped trying to support herself and him, Jackson said. She might engage in sex for money or have relationships on the side.

A woman needs to know her partner’s HIV status to understand her risk, Jackson said. She encourages women to ask their incarcerated partners to get tested and mail the results home or to get tested together once the men are released.

“It is your right to know what’s going on with your man’s health” — even if it means asking difficult questions, Jackson tells her peer educators. A woman should “feel disrespected” if a man doesn’t want to use a condom, and she shouldn’t back down on her request, Jackson said. “If he still doesn’t want to use a condom, then he’s not worthy of being in your space.”

It’s a message Jackson wishes she could tell her younger self. Jackson recently discovered that the man who infected her knew he was HIV-positive before they started dating. She thinks he may have tried to tell her but skirted around the issue. When she asked about his status, he told her he had taken two tests, one positive and the other negative. She also knew his blood had been rejected from a donation drive. But she didn’t probe further. At the time, Jackson worried, “I think this man might be positive, but I’m too scared to know.”

When Jackson talks about the importance of healthy, communicative relationships, she speaks from experience. Her ex-boyfriend took care of her and made her laugh, but he could also be verbally abusive and disrespectful, she said. When he said he didn’t want to use condoms, Jackson didn’t argue. “I didn’t love myself enough to protect myself by enforcing that he use condoms,” she said.

The women Jackson works with say her experiences come through in her teaching. They describe her as sweet and tender but also strong and stern. “She’s just a powerful woman,” said Patricia Walker, 54, of Inglewood, who went through the peer educator training in June. After taking Jackson’s classes, Walker found the courage to leave a 10-year relationship with a man who has been in and out jail five times. “She give you hope,” Walker said.

In the last few years, Jackson has embarked on a side project to speak about HIV at black churches. “I was pretty popular on the church circuit,” she said. After sharing her HIV story at her own church, the Resurrection Church of Los Angeles, “you could hear a pin drop,” she said. Women were in disbelief, not realizing they too could be at risk.

Jackson runs her church’s annual health fair, which includes an HIV testing van. She hopes other black churches, which historically have condemned HIV or avoided any discussion of it, will follow suit. “The more we have people talking about HIV, whether it’s in the church house or on the street, the better it will become normalized,” she said.

Married and divorced twice since her diagnosis, Jackson is now in a relationship with a man who doesn’t have HIV. And she doesn’t go for the bad boys anymore.

By Erin Loury, Los Angeles Times
August 20, 2012
Growing up in South Los Angeles, Precious Jackson said she was attracted to the bad boys. “My father was a bad boy,” she said. He was a hustler, a pimp, a drug addict. But Jackson also saw him as a gentleman who provided for his family. “I chose guys that emulated my dad,” she said.
The men she dated offered an escape from life with her overprotective grandmother, who raised her from the age of 5. “They had to be from the streets; they couldn’t be a square,” Jackson said. “I had to have some excitement.”
The excitement ground to a halt in 1998 when she received a letter from her then-boyfriend, who was in prison for drug possession. He was HIV-positive, he wrote. Jackson had tested negative before the relationship began. Her next test came back positive.
Until that day, Jackson thought only three types of people contracted HIV: gay men, injection drug users and people who slept around. She wasn’t any of those, so hadn’t thought herself to be at serious risk. But suddenly she was HIV-positive at age 26, and the virus had come from someone she trusted.
Now 40, Jackson considers HIV education her calling. For the last five years, she has worked with the Los Angeles-based Center for Health Justice, where she directs Project HOME Los Angeles. The program, whose name stands for Healthy Options Means Empowerment, serves women whose male partners are behind bars or have a history of incarceration. It teaches them how to become peer educators for the other women in their lives.
Jackson trains women in strategies to protect their physical health from sexually transmitted infections and to manage their emotional health and build better relationships. Self-esteem is not just a feel-good buzzword, it’s a key tool in HIV prevention, Jackson said. “If a woman is not emotionally balanced, then she would find herself making unhealthy choices which will increase her risk for acquiring HIV.”
Over the last three years, Jackson has guided 307 women through the program. Like her, many are black, facing one of the highest risks for acquiring HIV. Black people make up 12% of the U.S. population but account for nearly half the nation’s HIV cases and almost half of new infections. In 2009, black women accounted for 64% of new HIV diagnoses among women.
Prisons and jails are also an important front in the fight against HIV and AIDS. William Cunningham, a professor of medicine and public health at UCLA, described jails as a revolving door between the criminal justice system and the community. A small percentage of inmates may contract HIV in jail or prison, but most face a greater risk of acquiring the disease through their behavior on the outside, Cunningham said.
When inmates get released, “one of their highest priorities is to resume relationships,” Cunningham said. “High-risk sexual activity along with substance use is a volatile combination that increases the risk of transmission to the community.”
Women in relationships with inmates may face additional risk. If her partner in prison was the breadwinner, a woman may feel strapped trying to support herself and him, Jackson said. She might engage in sex for money or have relationships on the side.
A woman needs to know her partner’s HIV status to understand her risk, Jackson said. She encourages women to ask their incarcerated partners to get tested and mail the results home or to get tested together once the men are released.
“It is your right to know what’s going on with your man’s health” — even if it means asking difficult questions, Jackson tells her peer educators. A woman should “feel disrespected” if a man doesn’t want to use a condom, and she shouldn’t back down on her request, Jackson said. “If he still doesn’t want to use a condom, then he’s not worthy of being in your space.”
It’s a message Jackson wishes she could tell her younger self. Jackson recently discovered that the man who infected her knew he was HIV-positive before they started dating. She thinks he may have tried to tell her but skirted around the issue. When she asked about his status, he told her he had taken two tests, one positive and the other negative. She also knew his blood had been rejected from a donation drive. But she didn’t probe further. At the time, Jackson worried, “I think this man might be positive, but I’m too scared to know.”
When Jackson talks about the importance of healthy, communicative relationships, she speaks from experience. Her ex-boyfriend took care of her and made her laugh, but he could also be verbally abusive and disrespectful, she said. When he said he didn’t want to use condoms, Jackson didn’t argue. “I didn’t love myself enough to protect myself by enforcing that he use condoms,” she said.
The women Jackson works with say her experiences come through in her teaching. They describe her as sweet and tender but also strong and stern. “She’s just a powerful woman,” said Patricia Walker, 54, of Inglewood, who went through the peer educator training in June. After taking Jackson’s classes, Walker found the courage to leave a 10-year relationship with a man who has been in and out jail five times. “She give you hope,” Walker said.
In the last few years, Jackson has embarked on a side project to speak about HIV at black churches. “I was pretty popular on the church circuit,” she said. After sharing her HIV story at her own church, the Resurrection Church of Los Angeles, “you could hear a pin drop,” she said. Women were in disbelief, not realizing they too could be at risk.
Jackson runs her church’s annual health fair, which includes an HIV testing van. She hopes other black churches, which historically have condemned HIV or avoided any discussion of it, will follow suit. “The more we have people talking about HIV, whether it’s in the church house or on the street, the better it will become normalized,” she said.
Married and divorced twice since her diagnosis, Jackson is now in a relationship with a man who doesn’t have HIV. And she doesn’t go for the bad boys anymore.
erin.loury@gmail.com
Copyright © 2012, Los Angeles Times

Today the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released interim guidance for clinicians considering the use of daily oral antiretroviral pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for preventing HIV infection in their heterosexually active patients. The guidance published in today’s CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MM WR) is based on the results of international clinical trials where PrEP was found to reduce the risk of HIV infection among sexually active adults by 62 to 75 percent. Today’s guidance complements existing CDC PrEP interim guidance for men who have sex with men (MSM) and is designed to help ensure physicians who may be prescribing PrEP that they have accurate information and key cautions on its safe and effective use. With 50,000 Americans newly infected with HIV each year, additional prevention approaches are needed and PrEP is a welcome addition. PrEP helps people who do not have HIV to reduce their risk of becoming infected by taking a daily pill. When used consistently and in combination with other prevention methods, PrEP has been shown to be effective in MSM and heterosexual men and women.

On July 16, 2012 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved a labeling indication for the use of Truvada® [the fixed dose combination of tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF) plus emtricitabine (FTC)] to reduce the risk of sexually acquiring HIV infection among adults (both heterosexuals and MSM). CDC’s new interim guidance for heterosexually-active women and men includes recommendations similar to those provided in the MSM guidance, as well as a number of new recommendations for women of reproductive age and for couples in which one partner is HIV-positive and the other HIV-negative.

Additionally, the new guidance for use of PrEP to prevent heterosexual transmission includes a few minor modifications based on research findings that were published after the MSM guidance was issued in January 2011. CDC will update its MSM interim guidance to reflect these minor additions. Key points of today’s interim guidance include:

• PrEP should be targeted to individuals at very high risk for HIV infection, such as those whose regular sex partner is HIV-infected.
• It is critical that those using PrEP adhere consistently to the daily medication regimen.
• Clinicians should inform women considering PrEP who may become pregnant that the safety of TDF/FTC for infants exposed during pregnancy has not been fully assessed, but there is also no evidence of harm. Women who are breastfeeding should not use PrEP.
• PrEP is not a stand-alone solution: It should be delivered as part of a comprehensive package of prevention services, including counseling to reduce risk behavior and encourage adherence to the daily pill regimen, ready access to condoms and management of other sexually transmitted infections.
• Individuals prescribed PrEP must be confirmed to be HIV negative prior to use, and their HIV status, experience of side effects, medication adherence and risk behaviors must be monitored regularly during use.

Effective implementation of PrEP will depend on continuing work to resolve issues such as access to clinical care and medication, achieving high levels of medication adherence, targeting to persons at very high risk, and supporting the continued use of additional effective prevention methods. CDC will continue to work with our federal, state, and local partners to assess these issues and other implementation questions.

Please visit http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/prep/ for more general information on PrEP. Again, revised program guidance will be forthcoming. CDC is also leading the development of comprehensive U.S. Public Health Service guidelines on the use of PrEP, which is anticipated to be published later this year.

Thank you for your continued commitment of HIV prevention efforts.

I’m eager to learn how people in different countries are developing and implementing programs to decrease contributing co-factors, such as stigma, incarceration and socioeconomic class, particularly in communities of Latin and African descent.

We are 30-plus years into the AIDS epidemic, rapid HIV testing reveals results in as little as 60 seconds and new biomedical tools exist that can end the HIV pandemic. Still, Black Americans and Africans carry the burden of HIV. We must move beyond the level of wearing a condom, negotiating safe sex and having access to clean needles and begin to understand how complex factors increase one’s risk for acquiring and/or transmitting HIV–factors such as social networks; judicial policies like mass incarceration; access to housing and affordable and quality health care; social and family support. We also need to understand the roles that resource-driven survival behaviors, intimate-partner violence and individual-accountability factors such as financial security, health status and self-esteem play in perpetuating the epidemic.

I hope to gain more information and ideas that will help me develop culturally and linguistically competent programs and increase my constituents’ knowledge of basic, clinical and prevention science and epidemiology.

Upon my return I will feel purpose driven to develop programs that address the social determinants of HIV and that will help decrease community viral load by encouraging treatment as prevention. As a woman who co-exists with HIV, already having this knowledge helps me understand how important it is to adhere to my treatment regimen–both to help keep my viral load undetectable and decrease my chances of transmitting HIV to my partner. The additional information that I gain at AIDS 2012 will also help qualify me as a trusted source from which people can obtain culturally competent health information.

Precious Jackson is women’s program coordinator at the Center for Health Justice in Los Angeles.

Although women account for a small percentage of the overall number of people incarcerated in the United States, the number of females in prisons and jails and under community supervision is growing at an alarming rate. As a result, criminal justice and service agencies are challenged to meet the complex needs of these women in order to help them lead successful lives when they return to their communities.

Join presenters for a conversation about the current research and best practices related to the successful management and treatment of women in the criminal justice system. This webinar will present an overview of the research regarding women and the criminal justice system, with a particular focus on behavioral health. Discussion will also include gender-specific criminogenic risk and need assessment tools, as well as the importance of responsivity for females.

Presenters:

• Rachelle Ramirez, Program Associate, Center for Effective Public Policy and the National Resource Center on Justice-Involved Women
• Krista S. Gehring, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Criminal Justice, University of Houston-Downtown and Consultant for the National Resource Center on Justice-Involved Women

Date: July 12, 2012
Time: 2:00-3:30 p.m. ET

To register for this webinar, please click here.

Jose Rodriguez, Director
Office of Los Angeles City Councilmember Richard Alarcon
Council District 7
13517 Hubbard St.
Sylmar, CA. 91342
(818) 756-8409 Office

Visit Council District 7:
http://cd7.lacity.org

We are asking 500 HIV advocates from the United States who are attending the International AIDS Conference in Washington, D.C. to make the pledge to visit their Members of Congress. This is your chance to tell our nation’s leaders what they can do to reach an AIDS-free generation.

The special advocacy toolkit will:

• Help you to set up meetings with your legislator
• Help you to tell legislators to support the end of HIV/AIDS
• Help you to explain why you are involved in HIV advocacy

It contains how-to guides, helpful tips, and customizable resources on how to conduct successful legislative visits.  So join us in reaching out to tell legislators how to end the HIV epidemic.

Make the pledge  today to visit your Members of Congress in July! ]]> http://centerforhealthjustice.org/blog/?feed=rss2&p=398 0