Customer Reviews

Dying Inside: The HIV/AIDS Ward at Limestone Prison (Law, Meaning, and Violence)

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I am adjunct faculty at a historically black university. I became aware of this book in discussions with a high school classmate. My research and teaching is focused on engineering and science ethics education. This study illuminates topics of environmental injustice and inadequate health care.

Many states have a perfect storm of officials who run and are elected on "tough on crime" platforms (i.e., put more offenders in prison for longer), decreased state budgets, public resentment of or indifference to prisoners, and a prison population which is overwhelmingly differentially race-based. The result in Limestone Prison in Alabama was that all HIV/AIDS-diagnosed prisoners, numbers of whom were inordinately African-American, were housed in a single converted warehouse which was structurally deficient, filled with vermin, and overcrowded, and from which even the most ill were forced to walk to a remote dispensary several times a day to receive medications which were often not available.

A faculty friend has visited Limestone as a volunteer for many years to help prisoners pursue their GEDs while in prison. As I write this review, half a world away Greg Mortenson and others in the Central Asia Institute are helping young Pakistani and Afghani children, especially girls, by building schools for them. Whether in the war zone of Afghanistan or the war zone of the American inner city, the path to peace is not through aggression or fearful control, but through relationship, education and love.

This book chronicles a shameful past but also sheds light on a way ahead.