Before reading the article I did not think highly of people in jail. However, my opinion of AIDS was only changed because I knew someone who did die of AIDS due to a blood transfusion. Writing an article about AIDS and those in jail, really merges two things that society does not accept. Yet somehow after reading the article, you are left feeling bad about the people who are in jail in suffering from AIDS. This is because this is how the media wants you to feel. The article talks about how these patients have to get up at 3am to stand in line for their medicine, how they are separated from all of the other inmates, and how deplorable their living conditions are. The article highlights all the problems that these inmates face forcing you to feel nothing but pity for them. The article even goes so far as to poke fun at the courts justifying these conditions.

Because of all of the negative press that those with AIDS at one time received, I feel that these people are still suffering from. If Alabama in the only state that puts prisoners with AIDS aside from everyone else, then it is something that does not need to be done. The people in control in Alabama do not have any real reasons for keeping these people aside, so it must be because of social stigma. They remember when they were told by the media that those with AIDS were those who were cast out of society and had AIDS as their punishment. They feel that because these people are in jail, another place in which society discredits the people whom belong, that they should still be outcasts.

Out of the three categories of stigma, one definatley takes over in this article. The idea of being stigmatized due to ‘blemishes of the individual character’. These people do not have anything physically wrong with them, and they are not being stigmatized because of there race or their gender (even though that is something that other with AIDS do encounter, just not in this article) but they do have an illness. They are being thrown out of the mainstream because of their disease. A disease that effects each one of the individually.

I feel that this article does a great job at going against the dominant beliefs of society. It is an article that really shows you how much media effects the way you think. This article works to “naturalize” meaning in a more literal way. We should not be looking down on people with AIDS or people in jail, yet society still does this. After reading this article you think differently about people who are members of these two “social problem groups”. The natural feeling, no matter

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