‘For us, by us’

Picture of Jermaine Archer, a former PACE peer educator at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in Ossining, NY. Photo courtesy of Jermaine Archer.

By Ilyssa Daly and Chantelle Lee

At the peak of the HIV/AIDS crisis in the 1980s, New York state prisons were filled with fear. Nobody knew what HIV was yet or how it was transmitted and developed into a full-scale, inevitably fatal disease. In many prisons, that illness was known simply as “The Monster.”

“It was horrible,” said Richard Rivera, who was incarcerated for nearly 40 years and was released in 2019. “It was a stigma that marked the person as someone to be attacked, someone to be feared.”