people living with HIV at the center of the response has really been what has made a response to HIV so effective. And criminalization and other laws and policies that target people living with HIV, that push them at the margin, is bad for the global response. It is damaging for public health.
football, which is its real name, but for those who don't know the sport, it's very simple. The criminalization of drugs in this country has had such a disproportionate effect on people of color, particularly young black men,
And at Standing Rock, right now, there are 843 people, who are facing criminalization , facing criminalization , because a private military contractor was able to instigate corporate-sponsored and state-executed violence and rights violations against peaceful and prayerful water protectors.
Because these structures of incarceration are really organized around the denial of humanity. And this criminalization of being criminalized if you're a woman because you're addicted to a substance, being criminalized if you're a girl and you're being bought and sold, being criminalized if you're a boy and what should put you
And so much of what is in this book is that active resistance we were talking about, that insistence on being human and being seen despite that insistent criminalization . Yes, because so everybody plays a role in this.
And I'll just come back to me. You said about criminalization . So diagnosed in '96, given a year or two maybe to live.
of this disease and how you look at yourself-- but just when I thought I was out of the woods, and I might make it into a long, healthy life, I started worrying about criminalization . And I think that's a really undervalued barrier here.
And just early this month, the Constitutional Court of Colombia issued a decision in which it found that laws that allows for criminalization of HIV transmission and hepatitis B transmission was ineffective, unwarranted, and quashed the penal code provision that allowed for it.
So when we're thinking about these things, we need to be critically aware, both of historical change and cultural relativities. But then criminalization -- so let's just think about it a little bit more, and I might come back to this briefly at the end, depending on time. The creation of criminals.
I couldn't do it without Brittany, who's here, and cut50, and everyone that I work with-- of over-criminalization ? The main thing-- I believe the main purpose that I'm serving in lifting up my voice and showing you
And in those presidencies, what we got to see was a ratcheting up of the war on drugs, a ratcheting up of mass incarceration, and ratcheting up mass criminalization of very particular communities-- black communities, in particular. And as I grow up-- and as many of us grow up in this particular era and age group--
So whether it's the official police or those who feel they have been deputized by this type of policing, we are dealing with a moment where anti-black criminalization is being pumped up by media coverage. It's being sustained by media coverage.
But you would expect someone to be looking at Facebook or something. But I started to think about the criminalization of not doing anything, especially when you talked about like that quote from Audry Lorde and how
In the past few years, we've seen people living with HIV and the allies, entities like my own organization, UN AIDS, governments, working together to bring the issue of criminalization alive and call for change. And just early this month, the Constitutional Court of Colombia issued a decision in which it found that laws that
I might just go back slightly. Criminals are class apart and criminalization -- that second bullet point-- the creation of criminals. Who do we find?
many young people in these systems and we know that they have really bad experiences there, many of them, OK? So this also leads to this criminalization factor I was talking about when I alluded to "Moonlight." But there are all kinds of other pipelines. How many of you heard of the school-to-prison pipeline?
Perfect. So when do-- you are the owner of the first woman-owned, minority-owned CBD shop here in New York. Historically in America, cannabis criminalization has led to incarceration for many Americans. Mainstream sentiment has really started to embrace marijuana, in particular CBD, into everyday lifestyle products.
I think it could be at the forefront of more of them, and that would be really helpful. I wanted to mention-- Patrick was talking about the HIV criminalization . It's been something that Lambda Legal been involved in, really, the whole time I've been there.
The second thing that we need to do is, as Scott said before me, is clearly to take the blame out of HIV, to take stigma out. These are the laws that allow for HIV criminalization .
We must have this conversation as part of our overall commitment to disrupting mass incarceration. We cannot have any real comprehensive discourse around criminalization of black and brown communities without centering the experiences of women and girls.
I was talking to him about what made the fish so valuable. This story is-- it's very strange in some cases-- the criminalization of some of these things.
And this is first thanks to the work of civil society groups, like Lambda Legal here in the US, but also groups like HIV Justice Worldwide, which is a coalition of civil society folks that have come together to challenge HIV criminalization . Last year in July, these groups of civil society, together with UN AIDS, the International Association of Providers in AIDS Care, and the International AIDS Society,
And I think it's really important that we send the message that-- well, one, that it's a public health issue. That first and foremost, these HIV criminalization laws are affecting our ability to get people to step up and to get tested, to remain in treatment, to remain adherent to their medications. If you're trying to hide your HIV status from sexual partners, well, then there's a chance that you're not going to take
And so being conscious about who and kind of attacking at the roots of things seems like a good strategy. foreign assistance, those that are supporting the criminalization of homosexual acts.
It's not necessarily something that's just illegal itself, right? And so it was a weird situation where you actually had the criminalization international slave trade, including by the United States, but a kind of not just
stop this and really change its course and get it out of the criminalization
football, which is its real name, but for those who don't know the sport, it's very simple. I also think that decriminalization, leaving aside now the burden that criminalization has imposed upon a particular group,
Is society exhausted? Why is that? Look, we're dealing with 400 years of anti-black criminalization . So that is going to show up in how news talks about the murder-- and I will continue to call it a murder--
being criminalized if you're a girl and you're being bought and sold, being criminalized if you're a boy and what should put you in the principal's office puts you behind bars, there is this way in which mass incarceration has been about the systemic criminalization of the Black and brown body.
but we can only reach half of the people today. So to reach the rest, we have to remove stigma, remove discrimination, address criminalization , get that solved, and humanize the disease, so that people see people living with HIV as people living with HIV, not as someone who did something or didn't do something, or just a person who's
The second thing that we need to do is, as Scott said before me, is clearly to take the blame out of HIV, to take stigma out. It's been great. I just wanted to bring up a question about whether or not you think the epidemic today clearly is fueled by a lot of stigma and criminalization
football, which is its real name, but for those who don't know the sport, it's very simple. come to grips with the full scale of the physical and mental health consequences of incarceration, which is directly linked to criminalization of drugs.
I couldn't do it without Brittany, who's here, and cut50, and everyone that I work with-- Thank you, Malika. And I am grateful to you, Kim, for your courage to be an activist, to be able to be a voice against the over-criminalization
we know that we cannot back down from any injustice, no matter what the odds are. And at Standing Rock, right now, there are 843 people, who are facing criminalization , facing criminalization , because a private military contractor was able to instigate corporate-sponsored and
It's advertising. And yet, the aesthetic is being-- so it's the criminalization now not of an action, but of an aesthetic.