How can a brilliant political scientist like Rachel seem oblivious to the DLC?

This thesis analyses HIV/AIDS, health care, and prison reform in British and American prisons and concludes that HIV/AIDS has engendered a novel form of prison activism. It develops a schematic history of prison reform, arguing that administrative, co-operative, and oppositional models of reform can be discerned according to relationships between reformers and prison officials. Modern alliances between prisoners and non-prisoner allies - disruptions to the beneficence dynamic that has usually held between prisoners and their outside supporters - have been intensely threatening to prison officials and have resulted in backlash. This thesis also argues that the HIV/AIDS movement has prioritised the experiences and needs of people living with HIV/AIDS, and has defined people living with HIV/AIDS and their communities as HIV/AIDS experts. To a limited extent, the HIV/AIDS movement has embraced prisoners within its constituency. Despite often radical, oppositional tactics, prison officials have not precluded HIV/AIDS activists' access to prisons and prisoners. Prisoners living with (or at risk for) HIV/AIDS have been both the subjects of outsiders' advocacy, and the agents of advocacy themselves. There has not been an overwhelming backlash against HIV/AIDS activism in prisons, and prison administrators have engaged co-operatively with HIV/AIDS activists to a greater extent than they have with other prisoners' advocates. This analysis also finds that prison health care reform has focused, with limited success, on integrating prisoners into the remit of free-world health authorities. It is shown that HIV/AIDS in prison activists have had greater success with this strategy than health care reformers because they have approached their task primarily as an HIV/AIDS issue, rather than as prison reform. HIV/AIDS in prison activism shows that when advocates treat prisoners as members of communities that supersede incarceration, they may also supersede some of the constraints of traditional prison politics.