We also target the prison population for people leaving jails and prisons with deadly diseases that they weren’t getting education or medication or things to assist them out in the free world. We also work with people that have HIV and AIDS. It’s not limited to prison, but that is our target population. A lot of people are coming out. When they went into certain programs they didn’t have the documentation- driver’s licenses and the red tape so to speak. If you come into MASS and don’t have those documentations that are required, it is our job to help you get them and your medication and your education to help control this deadly disease which is being spread in our community. Just because you can’t get the medication and education doesn’t mean you aren’t still out there having sex. I am sure they don’t have it written on their forehead, “I have HIV.”

You would be surprised with the people leaving the Texas Department of Justice that are HIV infected. Because of confidentiality communities don’t know that people going into prison without HIV are coming out with HIV or AIDS. It is very common. Very common. The percentages are alarming.

I try to talk about bringing families together here at MASS in group sessions and talking about men that go off without it, but come back with HIV or AIDS. How do you tell your wife? And children? We try to help them understand that certain things may happen in prison that are not the fault of the one who might be carrying the virus. We try to counsel and keep the family bond. It’s not easy you know, for a person to… know that someone you love… that person has HIV. We have a lot of questions that have to be answered. In a closed session…

Oh my God, in Texas we’ve got 160,000+, everyday men and women are going into prison. I was released in 1989 and the prison population for women has probably doubled. That has been increasing since the early 1980’s that more women are going into prison. The women’s prison population when I went in 1980, there was only one unit. In Huntsville, Texas. Now the whole Riverside, Moutainview, Terrace, the whole Gatesville area. And they’ve moved outside and still expecting to build more.

I think it has to do with… economics. Women are trying to provide for their children the best way they can so they get into a life of crime, something to make some quick and fast money. They end up in the Texas Department of Justice. I think a lot of women get involved in some men that have them involved in the criminal justice system and they wind up in prison. We are in a society where there are certain criminals that are going to just simply do what is easy to make money and that is a life of crime. And the fact that I think that back in the 60’s and 70’s it was like, saving the families. If a mother actually really got in trouble, I think the judges and so forth really looked at what alternative there was versus sending them to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. I think it has a lot to do with laws that passed, that women are equal to men and so on and so forth so the justice system just looks at a criminal rather than a women or a man. If the shoe fits, wear it.