The who and how of HIV criminalization in the United States

• In Event: Crime vs. Health Issues: The Overlap between Public Health and Crime

Abstract

BACKGROUND: HIV criminalization refers to laws that make otherwise legal conduct illegal because of a person's HIV status. Over half the US states have HIV criminal laws. Previous research based press reports and court cases has dramatically undercounted enforcement. In this paper I rely on a series of state-level analyses of HIV-related criminal data to document the who and how of HIV criminalization across the US.

FINDINGS: 1) Thousands of people have come into contact with the criminal legal system because of their HIV status. This is many orders of magnitude greater than most previous estimates of the number of people criminalized. 2) Black people, women, and sex workers are disproportionately affected. People at the intersection of these identities are much more likely to be criminalized. 3) Enforcement is not correlated with risk; states criminalize people for conduct that cannot transmit HIV. 4) Women and men are criminalized for different behaviors; gender or race alone cannot account for the patterns of enforcement.

IMPLICATIONS: These findings suggest problems with achieving public health goals through the criminal legal system, and point to new avenues for studying the increasing entanglement of public health and criminal law.

Author

• Nathan Cisneros, UCLA School of Law