Instead of prisoner appreciation, the officials discovered they had a fierce riot on their hands. Inmates had taken the condom announcement, it was said, as a direct attack on their sexual identities and on their various masculinities, an "insult" or "innuendo" suggesting they were gay. There is reason to believe that the three killed in the ensuing struggles may have been gay men.

If condoms meant homosexual tendencies in a Jamaican prison, they might have meant something else in East St. Louis, Illinois, had they been on hand.

Prison problems and the threat of AIDS have jumped headlong into East St. Louis, Illinois, where a convicted car thief, burglar, and former inmate, Michael Blucker, began suing the Department of Corrections yesterday because, he says, he was infected with HIV following a series of rape-attacks by fellow HIV-positive prisoners.

Rape in prison is endemic. The rapists are not usually gay-identified. They are generally men who self-identify as heterosexuals, men seeking sexual release.

Prisoners with AIDS, according to Illinois corrections officials, cannot legally be separated from other prisoners. To do so, say these officials, would be to deprive prisoners of their civil rights. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch says that Michael Bluckner may have, with this suit, opened the door to policy reviews and changes in the Illinois state prison system. It is already part of prison policy, says the newspaper, to protect inmates from other prisoners.

Representative Cal Skinner (R-Crystal Lake, Ill.) a long-time proponent of AIDS-prison-patient segregation, says that when a car thief goes to prison, the judge sentences him to a certain length of time. The judge doesn't say, "Oh, by the way, you might also get a death sentence too."

Social justice activists have long crusaded for the distribution of condoms in American prisons, but thus far have met mostly stiff homophobic resistance from prison officials and county politicians. "They'd sooner watch men die than give 'em condoms," said one critic.

Prison officials on the inside of the system and fundamentalist religious moralists meddling in prison concerns while inflaming homosexual issues on the outside, believe wrongly that prison condom distribution means that society gives a green light to same-sex passions. Prison officials generally ignore the pervasiveness of homosexual behavior (as opposed to emotional desire) behind prison walls.

AIDS activists and others note that harsh moralism also infects the fundamentalist position on clean needles distribution. The fact that numerous studies have proved that needle programs significantly reduce HIV-infections, or that the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association have recommended such distribution, doesn't penetrate the zealot's mind.

Moralists choose to believe, falsely, that distributing condoms or clean needles does not mean saving lives but means condoning all-male-sex or drug use. What they do, in fact, is keep prisoners or drug users alive until they decide to rehabilitate themselves. Drug usage, according to exhaustive research completed, does not increase because of clean needle distribution. Nor is prison sex likely to soar because condoms are available.

Condoms or no, the fact of prison rape is a daily reality. Even if HIV-positive people were segregated, prison rapes would continue to occur and, even with safeguards, the virus would pass beyond artificial prison barriers.

Without clean needles, the virus spreads, inflecting partners of the drug users. In each instance at issue, whether it be condoms or needles, fundamentalist zealots resist sensible distributions, embracing instead a witless ethic, turning a blind eye to needless deaths.