Profiles in Action

"I don't know what words I would use for the pain and shock," she says, recalling her reaction when she first tested positive. It took two repeat tests for the news to really sink in. Then Henry, taking her HIV-positive status as a death sentence, sat back and "prepared to die." But her fellow inmates stepped in. "A few of the other women led me to educate myself and pass it on. I was embraced [by them]," she recalls. She soon became a protègé of Joann Walker, another HIV-positive activist at the prison (who has since died from AIDS) and began her new life's work. She has become, as one fellow inmate puts it, "a one-woman team living behind bars with a life-threatening disease and a long-term sentence."

Chowchilla is the largest women's prison in the state, operating at 200 percent capacity with 3,700 inmates stuffed eight to a cell. Depending on who provides the numbers (prison authorities or AIDS activists), there are between 75 and 200 women in the prison with HIV/AIDS. For them, Henry is an inspiration, a cheerleader, and a tireless champion of their health and dignity. Recently recognized with a "Positive Partnership" award by POZ magazine and Abbott Pharmaceuticals, her mission is to get the inmates to take charge of their health and question medical staff about their treatment regimens instead of meekly accepting inconsistent and often ineffective treatment. She is currently fighting the prison's "hot meds" policy that forces sick women to line up outdoors every day for their medication instead of allowing them to take it in their cells. She will pester prison officials and physicians until inmates get the help they need, and she has no qualms about filing medical and other grievances.

Above all, Beverly Henry is an educator. Her proudest moments come when she finds women she has mentored also becoming advocates. Her most recent success was an unprecedented letter-writing campaign by inmates asking for the compassionate release of an extremely ill peer-a brave move for inmates who must disclose their own HIV status to make such a request. Earlier this year she submitted a proposal to start an "HIV University" at Chowchilla, which would offer desperately needed courses in HIV treatment and prevention. She's also the prison's unofficial peer counselor, helping the recently diagnosed come to terms with their HIV status.

Admitting she's HIV-positive is critical to Henry's work. Her honesty is especially noteworthy in a setting where most women living with HIV feel shame or fear about disclosing their serostatus. "She wants the world to know so that others will be resolved to be out ," says Judy Greenspan, a veteran activist who works with the HIV in Prison Committee of California Prison Focus, an advocacy group. "Before she came, everybody was afraid to speak up. But she is fearless. She is their inspiration." Cynthia Chandler, an advocate with the Women's Positive Legal Action Network agrees: "I don't know if any of the other women would have done it without her there as a role model."

For Henry, being open gives her strength and serenity. "It keeps me healing inside," she says simply.

But strength, serenity, and honesty haven't always been a part of Beverly Henry's life. Hers is a classic story: She was bounced in and out of state custody since age 15 for offenses that included drug possession and dealing, burglary, prostitution, and armed robbery, all tied to her multiple addictions to heroin, cocaine, crack, and alcohol.

Released from prison in 1995, she entered a recovery program at the Tarzana Treatment Center in southern California, where she became an outreach worker in the needle exchange program. She was so good she eventually won election to the Los Angeles Housing Opportunities for People With AIDS (HOPWA) oversight panel. At one point, she even had lunch at the mayor's office; quite an experience for a former armed robber!

But unfortunately, Henry was also in love, seeking what she calls the "perfect lesbian romance," with a partner who was still using drugs. She slipped back into drugs instead. In early 1998, she sold .07 grams of heroin to an undercover cop. Because of her previous convictions and California's "Three-Strike" law, those .07 grams of heroin brought her 15 years in prison. She will be 60 years old when she is finally released.

"I am paying for [the previous convictions] all over again," Henry says bluntly. "But I do know I have changed." Looking ahead, not back, she says, "I am going to be somebody when I leave here. I want to do some good things with my life."

Tim Kingston is a San Francisco reporter for Frontiers.

A virtual outsider to the world of criminal justice, Richman came to her job through the the back door. She started years ago as an arts program coordinator through a federally funded grant. As a single mother and painter tired of hustling for odd jobs, she found the security and benevolence of her new position most attractive. "I did it for a year and really loved being in an environment where you could maybe make a difference, where you could maybe influence change," she says. "You could contact another human being in need and serve some purpose-it made me feel good." So good that she worked her way up through the prison administration, bypassing disgruntled corrections officers, lieutenants, and captains. Technically, she's one of them now, but her background has given her a different approach to the job.

RIDOC, an unusual combo prison-and-jail system, implemented its comprehensive health program for HIV in 1988. Today it's a state-of-the-art model of community collaboration designed to provide continuity of care for prisoners with HIV infection before, during, and after incarceration. Players include the State Department of Health, the State Department of Corrections (DOC), Miriam Hospital (affiliated with Brown University), and a host of community-based organizations that work closely together. Upon entry, the program offers prisoners pre- and post-test counseling, discharge planning, transitional services, and links to resources in the outside community. Post-release services include follow-up medical treatment, housing, substance-abuse treatment, psychosocial support, and long-term case management. According to Timothy P. Flanigan, M.D., director of the Immunology Center at Miriam Hospital, studies show a steady decline in women's recidivism rates at RIDOC. So has the incidence of HIV. In 1990, 6.1 percent of RIDOC's women prisoners were HIV-positive. That figure has dropped; only one or two new cases of HIV a year have been reported in the past three years.

As the portrait of a kinder, gentler warden, Richman greets visitors dressed in loose black clothing, her manner relaxed. Forthcoming and frank, she says she she has nothing to hide and welcomes community interest in RIDOC's HIV program. She's concerned about the women in her care, she says, and speaks eloquently about her authority and responsibility, while stressing that she's neither God nor a judge. Her office resembles that of a school principal-except for the imposing TV surveillance screens lining the wall that monitor prisoner and staff behavior, including forbidden sexual activity. But her door is open, allowing corrections staff to breeze in and out.

Richman subscribes to the new notion of contemporary corrections that replaces systemic abuse of prisoners with a holistic approach to their well-being and safety. Every day she allocates time to read complaint letters from needy prisoners and prides herself on creating a nurturing environment within a male-oriented world. With most of the staff and 94 percent of the prison population being male, "women need to have a spokesperson, an advocate to represent their needs," says Richman. That's especially true of women with HIV. "Whenever there is a minority population with needs that are unique, someone has to advocate for those needs," she says simply.

That doesn't mean everything is peachy in the Big House. A self-confessed compromiser, a fine-line walker, Richman struggles to balance her values with those of corrections and the state legislature, whose policies she is required to enforce. For example, Rhode Island passed a law in 1989 requiring mandatory HIV testing of all state prisoners. Though Richman sees an ethical dilemma here, she supports it-at least publicly. "When they [prisoners] come to prison, it's often the first time anyone is in a position to help them," she explains. "If we don't give them medical attention and treatment, if we don't test them for HIV, they'll come and they'll go and we'll lose them." She may be rationalizing, but her reasoning is pragmatic.

She applies the same logic to another thorny problem-the absence of any HIV prevention materials in the jail. Although RIDOC has a distinguished HIV program, there is no push, not even a tap, toward providing latex condoms, dental dams, gloves, bleach, or clean works to prisoners, and outside agencies who bring them in are prohibited from distributing them. Richman dutifully aligns herself with the Department of Corrections on the issue. She can't prohibit sex and drugs and then dispense tools that condone these behaviors, she argues. As for sex or drugs in the prison, this barely happens, she maintains. Stealing a glance at the surveillance monitor, she says that corrections politics would never allow for the distribution of bleach or dental dams. "You can't do that in this setting for a whole bunch of reasons," she argues. "Even if you wanted to, this culture would kill you." Clinging to the middle ground, Richman concedes she's no radical. Instead, her success as warden demands that she be willing to negotiate with the entrenched bureaucracy of the DOC.

Her greater ambition is to seek an alternative to incarceration, such as substance-abuse treatment, for nonviolent offenders. "It is not in anyone's best interest to be doing retribution and punishment," she says. "We lose fiscally and we lose humanely."

Staff researcher Cindra Feuer wrote about Latinos and HIV in our September issue.

The dynamic duo met two and a half years ago. At the time, Duncan had been out of prison for three years. He had entered prison on charges of armed robbery in 1993, a year after he tested positive for HIV. As an inmate he was given no information about his medications or his disease. When his meds made him nauseated, he feared it was a sign of HIV's progression rather than a predictable side effect. "They kept telling me I was getting better but I couldn't tell 'cause I felt sicker and sicker," he recalls. Upon release, Duncan devoted himself to helping those still inside, mailing information to inmates through We the People, a local people-with-AIDS coalition. He met Feyler, executive director of the AIDS Law Project of Pennsylvania, when he approached the project for help with his own medical care. She advised him that his continued health was unlikely to win him approval for disability benefits, but she found funding to expand his prison advocacy activities. A partnership was born.

Feyler insists on including current and former inmates in all phases of advocacy and planning. "Lawyers can be notorious for not involving their clients," she says, "but this is absolutely essential. Every community has folks who have been incarcerated who are willing to become advocates."

Duncan and Feyler know what they're talking about. They have inspired the local service system to take prerelease and discharge planning seriously. When the county jails gave out incomplete antiviral regimens, the pair forced changes through a contempt ruling on a previous standard of care class-action suit. They also work to keep HIV-positive people out of prison, which can be a life-saving prevention strategy. Feyler helps clients resolve old bench warrants so they won't get picked up on the street and risk interrupting their care, and encourages criminal defense attorneys to fight for reduced or alternative sentencing for HIV-positive clients.

At a time when the needs of inmates are massive and resources slim, Duncan and Feyler balance their efforts between caring for individual prisoners and advocating for systemwide change. Their first priority is medical care. "For the inmate who calls collect and whose meds haven't been delivered because they've just been locked up and there's a delay, or the prisoner who is losing weight and needs food supplements or access to medications, you want to solve that problem first," says Feyler.

Then comes the larger task of using the law to create better overall systems and standards. "The first role of an attorney is to utilize what law there is that you can get some leverage from," Feyler says. But she emphasizes that it's not all about throwing legal weight around-their ultimate goal is to work with the system. "We've tried to use our leverage and our knowledge as attorneys to get people to the table, with the possibility of litigation in the background."

Duncan admits his original impulse was to "sue, sue, sue." But he has tempered that attitude with the success of what he calls the "more flies with honey than vinegar approach." He recalls that "In the beginning, we couldn't even talk to the Department of Corrections. We got this far basically by schmoozing and calling them and working with them."

Along the way, Duncan and Feyler have also learned a lot about how service organizations can best work with inmates. The first rule? Answer a lot of letters. "You have a person first diagnosed in prison, scared as hell, who can't tell nobody in prison so he writes to an AIDS service organization he finds in the telephone book," explains Duncan. "They never write him back, so he's like, 'Well, I guess they don't care.'"

The Law Project also mails monthly information packets, including fact sheets that focus on treatment and public-benefit information tailored for prisoners. This spring it mailed a survey asking about conditions positive prisoners face. The results, such as the finding that 52 percent had experienced interruptions in medication, and 64 percent had significan weight loss as a result of inadequate nutrition, have been used to advocate for changes and increased funding for prisoner services.

So what's next for this dynamic duo? Under Feyler and Duncan's leadership, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has applied for a $3 million federal Special Projects of National Significance grant to fund a comprehensive system of services and advocacy for current and former prisoners in Philadelphia and Allegheny counties, the regions that are home to the majority of people with HIV. If funded, the project will be run by a consortium of AIDS service providers who will provide technical assistance on legal matters. "The grant would mean to me that we finally won," says Duncan. "After two-and-a-half years of bickering and arguing with funding sources as to the importance of spending money on HIV prisoners, if the grant comes through it's like a smack in their face saying the federal government thinks this is important."

Julie Davids is the director of Project TEACH, an HIV treatment, education, and activist training program. She is a longtime member of ACT UP-Philadelphia.

Sanchez's soft eyes become focused and intense when he's discussing the criminal justice system, his favorite subject. He's a man on a mission who comes to an interview armed with documents and statistics to support his sharp analysis of the crisis facing prisoners, especially those with HIV and AIDS.

Born in New York, Sanchez had a difficult childhood and turned to the streets at 15, graduating from small-time hustling to drug dealing to survive. At 17, he was arrested for drug possession and sentenced to five years in prison under the tough Rockefeller drug laws. "I remember when they called my name over the loudspeaker at Riker's [Riker's Island] and told me I was going upstate to Great Meadows [in Comstock, New York]. I thought I was going to a farm," he says wryly, adding, "I was very naive." Great Meadows -- nicknamed Gladiator School -- was a violent, racist place that did not address Sanchez's drug problem. As soon as he got out, he went back to using drugs and eventualy landed in prison again. So the cycle began.

At 29, Sanchez left prison for the last time. "It was the '70s, the summer of Jaws," he recalls. Fudging a job application, he got work at a movie theater, but was fired when they found out he had a record. "That was a turning point in my life," he says. "I was tired of the prison lifestyle." Still angry today, he adds, "Here I was trying to do the right thing, getting my life back in order." Luckily, at this make-or-break point, he found help through the Fortune Society, an agency serving ex-offenders. Starting as a receptionist, he quickly worked his way up, eventually joining its board, where he still sits today.

With trailblazing spirit, Sanchez then headed for the New York City Department of Health's AIDS Crisis Hotline, where he worked for two years as a counselor. It was the mid '80s, when information about the epidemic was in high demand. Aware of the situation in New York, Sanchez initiated two prison projects, first with the city's Human Rights Commission, then the Latino Commission on AIDS.

With a finger in every pie, Sanchez now balances a full-time job at the Prison Project with his volunteer work at the Alliance for Inmates with AIDS (ALIA), a 540-member statewide coalition that advocates on behalf of prisoners with HIV and AIDS. Sanchez helped found it in 1989. Having navigated the complex prison system himself, Sanchez saw a need to help others make their way through and organized a working group of ex-cons as an offshoot of ALIA. "The idea behind it is to form linkages with prisoners and existing peer education programs so that prisoners will have a voice in articulating whatever their needs and issues and concerns are," he explains. He's also enthusiastic about other ALIA projects, including the introduction of Spanish-language educational materials on HIV and its shadow epidemic, hepatitis C, a growing problem among former injection drug users.

At the Prison Project, Sanchez troubleshoots for individual inmates. In an average week, he'll handle complaints concerning medical parole, denial of medications, and routine brutality. One well-placed phone call to a prison medical officer or someone else in charge can make a difference, he says. In the past, he often referred complaints to legal aid lawyers at Prison Legal Services (PLS), a state-funded agency. That option ended in 1998, when Gov. George Pataki (R-New York) vetoed the legal aid budget. It was recently restored. Sanchez believes PLS lawyers are crucial advocates for New York prisoners.

Topping his own wish list for change is the repeal of what he considers New York's draconian Rockefeller drug laws. The laws dictate mandatory minimum jail sentences for minor drug offenders. Sanchez sees a direct connection between the Rockefeller laws and the swelling of the HIV-positive population in New York's prisons, since many contract the virus through injection drug use. "It's one of the most horrendous laws put on the books," says Sanchez. "There are tens of thousands of people who it's just destroyed-their lives and their families."

Turning to prison health care, Sanchez speaks of its dismal quality in most instutitions. "I've been doing this work a long time -- more than 20 years -- and I've come to the conclusion that things are at their worst now," he says.

Sanchez has left the days of street glamour and quick money long behind. Although prison activism clearly has its rewards, it's also tough, lonely work. "Sometimes I feel totally burnt out," he admits. "Sometimes it feels like a drop in the bucket. But I work at it because I'm really trying to make a difference for people." On that score, there's no question that he's already succeeded-many times over. And given his "incorrigible" nature, it's unlikely he'll stop here. When it comes to social justice and fighting the system, Sanchez is a lifer.