Does female prisoners are more prone to HIV than male prisoners - Assignment Example

What struck me the most is the fact that female prisoners are more prone to HIV than male prisoners. This statistics is rather shocking and I tried to think of the possible reasons why this might be so. Presumably female offenders commit crimes due to their lower incomes, and end up in imprisonment. Their usually single, unmarried and might be taking care of at least one child. These accounts for the fact that female prisoners were unemployed before being incarcerated. It is no wonder that female prisoners are at high risk of contracting HIV/AIDS, because they are plagued with poverty, lack of social support and state benefits, lack of satisfactory education to commence work.

Even though many scholars claim that we live in society with equal opportunities, women have a long history of working at minimum salary and they are often not included in welfare programs where they can obtain training skills. Low-paid jobs effectively cause other personal relater troubles which enforce women to prostitution, to drug abuse or dealers and expose them risk behaviour situations and consequently to viral transmission. Supposedly, the majority of women who enter prison institution are not aware of their medical conditions and have no knowledge of their infection.

Therefore, an extensive screening is required in order to keep track of the possible symptoms and variety of tests should be run to register HIV/AIDS serostatus. Another important issue that many authors point out is that females with low social status do not have adequate access to the latest treatments. Prejudices still work in all institutional levels and doctors seeing a Latino or African-American woman decide that she is on welfare, and think that she is irresponsible and would not follow the proper intake of the prescribed medicaments, so they are not willing to provide her with a deserving treatment.