What is Needed?

Academic literature enthusiastically affirms supportive housing models as a vital component of provision of care to justice-involved PLWHA. There are a variety of supportive housing models, all intended to provide stable housing while also engaging the client in case management, mental health, substance use, and other supportive services. Rates of substance use and overdose are heightened among recently released individuals, and substance use is a known risk-factor for unstable housing and homelessness. Housing First, provision housing paired with on-site supportive services without the requirement of sobriety, is one supportive housing model that speaks directly to the intricacies of serving PLWHA who have also experienced incarceration. When stable housing is provided alongside on-site medical care management, psychosocial services, and a harm reduction ideology, a more holistic and sustainable approach to treating justice-involved PLWHA is achieved.

In spite of the strides made by the HIV/AIDS Service Administration (HASA), there are still significant barriers to providing adequate housing for formerly incarcerated PLWHA. The paired stigma of incarceration and HIV/AIDS, lack of legislative protections specific to criminal justice involvement and HIV status, landlord non-compliance with the Fair Housing Act, and the overall scarcity of affordable housing, all work to create substantial barriers to stable housing access for formerly incarcerated PLWHA. Housing policies that speak to specific needs of PLWHA with justice involvement are vital in ensuring that the population can not only access housing in theory, but also in practice.

To date, research conducted to examine the causal relationship between stable housing and health care outcomes has not recognized incarceration as a central contributing factor, and interventions meant to impact homelessness, justice-involvement, and/or HIV/AIDS health outcomes, have not adequately addressed the multiple interwoven identities that justice-involved PLWHA connect with. More robust study of housing interventions directed at improving HIV treatment and prevention outcomes for justice-involved PLWHA is needed, and housing interventions that speak to the overlapping identities of this population are essential to the simultaneous address of health and housing needs for justice involved people living with HIV/AIDS.