ASHINGTON (Sputnik) — President Barack Obama has announced a National HIV/AIDS strategy, but this policy "lacks one crucial element: the criminal justice system’s role in fueling HIV and AIDS," McLemore maintained.
The new strategy calls for revision of HIV-specific criminal laws, but the researcher insisted that many other aspects of the US criminal justice system had enormous impact on the HIV epidemic still sweeping the United States.
"The groups most affected by HIV — African-American men and women, men who have sex with men, people who use drugs and transgender women — are also disproportionately arrested, convicted and incarcerated for criminal offenses," McLemore wrote in an opinion-editorial published on Wednesday.
McLemore argued that the two patterns of racial disparities were closely interrelated.
"The racial disparities in HIV are stark and disturbing," she wrote. "African-Americans are 13 percent of the US population, but 56 percent of new HIV infections."
African American men are diagnosed with HIV at seven times the rate of white men, and African American women account for 64 percent of new HIV diagnoses among women, she noted.
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) people are disproportionately represented in both the HIV epidemic and in every aspect of the US criminal justice system, McLemore wrote.
"We will not realize the goal of an AIDS-free generation until we address the role played by our criminal justice system in the epidemic."
HIV infections are alarmingly high among transgender women, with some studies showing that one in three being HIV-positive, and even higher among transgender women of color, the researcher observed.
"Due to pervasive employment discrimination, transgender women are often forced to seek work in the underground economy, frequently as sex workers."
The failure to address the contribution of criminal justice issues to the HIV epidemic places the United States well behind the curve in international health policy, McLemore concluded.
