MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) – There was celebration at Alabama’s Limestone and Tutwiler prisons last November when corrections officials said many activities that had been off-limits to inmates with HIV were being desegregated.

But more than 200 men in Limestone’s HIV unit are still being kept apart in some areas, prison officials confirmed last Monday.

Prisons Commissioner Richard Allen said safety concerns dictate that men with HIV be escorted as they move about the Harvest prison, which was designed to hold 1,628 inmates but houses about 2,300.

“It’s a security issue,” said Allen, who met with inmate advocates and American Civil Liberties Union representatives on the issue last week.

“We all agree it’s going to require some looking into. One thing we don’t want to do is put the AIDS people in a situation where other inmates want to retaliate against them,” he said. “Our obligation is to protect the public and also to protect the inmates.”

Before November, the HIV-positive men and women in DOC’s custody weren’t able to do much outside their segregated units within the prisons, but they’re now allowed to eat, worship and visit family members alongside general population inmates.

That is, in theory anyway.

Space issues have kept mealtimes segregated at Limestone, and Margaret Winter, associate director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, said the men are made to sit in separate pews during chapel services.

She said it’s also “disturbing” that the men with HIV have their family visits in a room separate from the general population visiting area.

“It’s disturbing because people don’t necessarily tell their family about their HIV status and this is a dead giveaway,” Winter said from her office in Washington, D.C. “The families are saying ‘Why are we sitting over here and everybody else is over there?”

Integration has gone much more smoothly at Tutwiler, where there are about 15 inmates in the HIV ward, otherwise known as “Dorm E.”

Emily Cain, who is serving a life sentence, remembers the late 1980s when HIV inmates had to wear masks and the hallways were cleared when they walked through. The 53-year-old from Dothan said she’s elated with Tutwiler’s progress and feels sorry the men aren’t quite there yet.

“I can relate to that because it happened to me. I can relate to how the men feel,” she said in the dorm Monday. “You feel bad, you feel ashamed. I didn’t even want to go out at all.”

Winter’s group is also campaigning for Alabama HIV inmates to be allowed to participate in work release programs.

“Our strong recommendation is that they make a time table,” she said, adding that the plan should include 90 days of “intensive HIV education.”

“I think we feel strongly that without that it could be another 20 years,” of inmate segregation. “You have to have a concrete timetable,” she said.

Allen said the department has already started sessions to educate all prisoners about HIV and help shake some of the negative and incorrect misconceptions about the disease.

While most prison jobs and educational classes have been opened to inmates with HIV, they are not allowed to work in the kitchen after a majority of general population inmates voted against that.

Allen said he hopes the education and training sessions will help change the inmates’ minds. But until then, he said, the escorts will remain.

“It’s going to take some time. It may take several sessions,” he said. “We’re committed to getting the attitudes changed.”