From HIV to the PIC: How AIDS Activism Shaped Prison Abolition

• In Event: AIDS and the Crisis of American Empire

Abstract

This paper traces the influence of HIV/AIDS prison activists and activism in shaping the development, agendas, and analyses of the prison abolition movement, which grew with renewed strength as the U.S. consolidated a new phase of global power predicated domestically on the convergence of mass incarceration and social abandonment.

HIV/AIDS activism by, for, and with incarcerated people formed a strong current of the wider HIV/AIDS movement across the 1980s and 1990s United States, generating strategies of peer-led AIDS education and care in prisons, inside-outside solidarity networks and campaigns, litigation, memorialization, and political thought. This activism extended conceptions of AIDS community by addressing the confluence of incarceration, criminalization, and welfare cutbacks in the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS and their loved ones. Speaking generally, HIV/AIDS activism declined in the United States with the introduction of highly effective medications (1996) and the deepening concentration of HIV disease among Black people, particularly those who are queer, Southern, trans, and/or women. Amidst that wider decline, HIV/AIDS prison activists continued to organize, but they shifted their networks and strategies into the prison abolition movement, whose radical visions countered disappointments they had met in struggling against HIV/AIDS behind bars. In turn, HIV/AIDS activists expanded the meanings of prison abolition by naming the epidemic as fueled by incarceration, by situating prisons as a public health crisis, and by defining gendered poverty and queer belonging as abolitionist concerns.

Drawing from a book manuscript in progress, this paper explores the impacts of HIV/AIDS activism on prison abolition by tracing the roles of HIV/AIDS prison activists in organizing, leading, and speaking at Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex, the conference held September, 1998 in Berkeley, California that is widely viewed as a founding event in the contemporary prison abolition movement. Through research sources including the Angela Y. Davis Papers (Schlesinger Library), Critical Resistance archives (Oakland), and oral history interviews, I explain the individual backgrounds of HIV/AIDS prison activists at Critical Resistance and analyze what connections activists identified between HIV/AIDS and incarceration, including how they defined HIV/AIDS as an abolitionist issue. Further, with an eye to the broader leftist politics of Critical Resistance and its participants, I analyze how activists understood the convergence of HIV/AIDS and incarceration in global and anti-imperialist terms. How did situating HIV/AIDS as an abolitionist issue extend, rather than diverge, from defining the epidemic as a global justice concern? What can we learn about late-stage American empire by naming HIV/AIDS activists’ roles in contesting carcerality as state violence?

Author

• Emily Hobson, University of Nevada-Reno