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A group of panelists discussed how correctional facilities respond to sexual activity, HIV and the issues faced by people after incarceration who have HIV or AIDS, Monday, at the UCLA School of Law.

The panel was sponsored by the Williams Project, a UCLA think tank dedicated to the field of sexual orientation law and public policy, and included L.A. County sheriff’s deputies, a doctor, a case manager at a treatment center, a former inmate living with HIV, and a lawyer who has worked with the American Civil Liberties Union.

Each of the panelists made individual presentations about their roles and experience with the issue of sex and HIV in correctional facilities.

One of the panelists, Mary Sylla, a former ACLU lawyer and the founder and director of CorrectHELP, a group devoted to the rights of inmates living with HIV or AIDS, helped the L.A. County Jail start the largest condom distribution program of its kind last year.

Even though sex is illegal in correctional facilities, the reality is “inmates do have sex in prison,” said UCLA Law Professor Sharon Dolovich, who moderated the panel discussion.

CorrectHELP is concerned with maintaining equal rights for inmates with HIV or AIDS, including equal access to programs in prison and access to proper medication and medical care.

Ensuring proper medical care of inmates with HIV and AIDS is important in order to protect the community at large, said William King, a doctor and lawyer who studied the effectiveness of the CorrectHELP program. Specifically, when HIV patients miss medication dosages, they risk building a resistance to the drugs.

Another panelist experienced the issue firsthand. Ronnie Snyder is a former inmate living with HIV. He was convicted of embezzlement and sentenced to do restitution, a standard sentence for his type of crime. He said because of his HIV status and the discrimination that comes along with being HIV positive, he was denied restitution and instead forced to serve 19 months in prison.

Most of his time was spent at Del Norte Prison, the only prison in California with a segregated unit for HIV positive inmates. Inmates in the segregated unit are denied access to almost all the programs available to the rest of the inmates at the prison.

Snyder said sex was common both among inmates, and between inmates and guards, who traded oral sex for small privileges, such as a few cigarettes.

Even though all the inmates knew who was HIV positive because they carried bags containing 30-day supplies of medication, sex with those inmates occurred regularly, Snyder said.

In L.A. County, there are separate units for gay inmates in jails.

Los Angeles Sheriff’s Deputies Bart Lanni and Randy Bell, who were also on the panel, helped start a classification system in 1982 to protect gay inmates, who panelists said are more vulnerable to harassment and rape in jail.

The classification system is used to make certain an inmate who claims he is gay is in fact gay, since gang members who do not want to deal with rival gang members in the normal jail unit sometimes lie about their sexual orientation in order to be placed in the “K-11” unit, or the gay unit.