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Penitentiary to establish peer group for inmates
Banceuy Penitentiary in Bandung, West Java, is establishing peer groups for inmates with HIV/AIDS who are serving sentences in all prisons in the province, penitentiary head Ilham Djaya has said
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B
anceuy Penitentiary in Bandung, West Java, is establishing peer groups for inmates with HIV/AIDS who are serving sentences in all prisons in the province, penitentiary head Ilham Djaya has said.
"We are cooperating with HCPI *HIV Cooperation Program for Indonesia* in designing *the program* so hopefully we will be able to distribute the design to all prisons by the end of the year," Ilham said in Bandung recently.
Ilham said the peer groups would comprise of inmates with HIV/AIDS and would be established to help prevent further infections of the lethal disease among other inmates.
"Up until now few prisons have these kinds of peer groups," he said.
Ilham also said the Banceuy penitentiary was one of the seven reference prisons to deal with HIV/AIDS. "Among the facilities we have here are 17-bed capacity wards to hospitalize HIV/AIDS patients," he said.
Besides designing the HIV/AIDS peer group program for other prisons, according to Ilham, his penitentiary was also currently providing education on the disease. Thirty participants joined the three-day training, which was designed for employees of penitentiaries or other detention centers in Bandung.
Separately the Justice and Human Rights Ministry's director general of penitentiaries, Untung Sugiyono, said the number of inmates had exceeded the combined capacity of the country's 413 prisons of about 90,000.
"We currently have 140,423 inmates," said Untung as quoted in a release issued by the East Java AIDS Commission (KPA), Wednesday.
As a result, said Untung, security became vulnerable and rates of infections in the penitentiary compounds were also very high. "The vulnerability *to infection* does not just apply to the inmates but to wardens as well," Untung said.
Reports have shown that of 1,193 inmates who underwent HIV tests, 25 percent were positively infected. "The increase in drugs *related* cases in Indonesia also accounts for the high prevalence of HIV in prisons," he added.
Head of the provincial Justice and Human Rights Agency Danny Hamdani Kusumapradja said all of the prisons in West Java had people convicted of drugs charges. Currently, he added, there were 5,276 inmates sentenced for drugs-related cases serving time in the province's prisons and detention centers.
In total, he said, there were 16,069 inmates in West Java while the capacity of the province's penitentiaries was only 8,131.
"This has caused an increase in the prevalence of a number of infectious diseases including TB, hepatitis and HIV/AIDS among inmates," he said.
Such high prevalence, according to Danny, required a deep understanding of HIV/AIDS from the respective wardens. "That is why HIV/AIDS education like this has become increasingly urgent," he said.
According to data from the West Java Health Agency, there were a total of 4,857 HIV/AIDS cases from 1989 to June 2009, of which 2,937 were AIDS and the rest 1,920 were HIV-positive cases.
"Some 66 percent of them were infected through the use of shared syringes among drug users," West Java KPA press officer Tri Irwanda said.
