Rural HIV: Brief interventions for felony probationers

HIV/AIDS in Southern rural America has been described as an epidemic. Furthermore, the HIV prevalence rate among criminal justice populations is higher than the general population in both rural and urban areas. One segment of the criminal justice population, felony probationers, has not been targeted for HIV/AIDS interventions and little is known about rural HIV risk behaviors. Probation is an appropriate setting for examining HIV interventions because rural participants can be easily identified and contacted. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to describe an HIV intervention for Southern rural probationers and to profile participants (N=800) on their demographics and risk behaviors by degree of criminality. Results suggest that HIV interventions are needed to target rural probationers, especially those with extensive arrest histories since they engage in high-risk behaviors, including illicit substance use and unprotected sex. This project is supported by grant #R01DA11580 from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. The opinions expressed are those of the authors.